


Metamorph

by Juceisloose



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Smut, Fluff, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Mild Gore, New Character - Freeform, Past Villain John, Plot, Present Vigilante John, Shapeshifter, Shapeshifting, Smut, Tension, detective John, metahuman
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 11:01:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15817548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juceisloose/pseuds/Juceisloose
Summary: John has been given a chance to redeem himself and rekindle he and Bruce's relationship after his flash in the pan, his brief Joker episode, and he is more than grateful to take it. He is willing to do anything to prove to Bruce his apologies are genuine, his affection true - even help him track down the strange man wearing his face that claims Bruce has wronged him...





	1. Arkham Imposter

  
John Doe had never received a visitor, not before one man, and what a significant man he was indeed. He wasn’t even sure if there had been people in his forgotten life to mourn his confinement and care about coming up to visit him, which was quite possibly more upsetting than the fact he’d never been visited alone.

He was no younger than twenty, no older than thirty, surely; he was a grown man that had gone through the process of childhood and surpassed it – however, much like a child, he couldn’t remember anything before gaining consciousness in a dingy room (in his case, an Arkham holding cell) with severe-looking doctors dutifully recording his progress on colourful clipboards, covering up their frowns. He’d adjusted to his new life with remarkable speed, despite all deterring circumstances; he wasn’t stupid, and, even then, freshly getting used to the swing of things in Arkham Asylum, he’d known good behaviour would get him further than lashing out like he’d wanted to at the time, but he’d been in a constant state of turmoil – had no one cared? What was his real name? Did not even his parents care he was sick and locked away somewhere, the people that had made him with their own flesh and blood? How old was he? What kind of a man had he been? Why did he look different to everyone else?

To this day, he liked to pretend to doctors he knew about his past and that it was a secret locked and buried with no key. Maybe, one day, he’d start to believe it himself, he liked to tell himself. Truthfully, it was a mystery to not just those around him but to him himself.

Over time, the questions had grown less important, like the sharpness of a critical wound dulling into a gentle ache through the process of healing, but sometimes he still wondered. He’d found coping methods – ways to reign in his savage temper and ways to quell the questions that only killed him a little bit more every time he thought about them – and, with the help of Joan Leland, most of these coping methods he practised inflicted no harm on himself or others.

The fuzzy Arkham lights were one thing he found himself indulging in from time to time, even now. The way they hummed, like there were live insects embedded in the ceiling, encouraged him to close his eyes and imagine he was inside a remote field, listening to the content buzz of wildlife, each soft grass blade around him as bright as glowing paint in his imagination back when he’d first stayed in Arkham; the real outside world was something he had never indulged in before at that point. The other thing he’d relaxed himself with was not a figment of his imagination – it was something that was, conveniently, sitting right in front of him, staring attentively at a hand of cards, oblivious to John’s incredulous scrutiny. Sometimes, John did wonder if it was his imagination that conjured up someone so beautiful and fascinating and surreal and socially important – someone that seemed to care about him, impossibly, as much as he cared about him. Days of cutting out newspaper clippings were over; he had the man in front of him, close enough to touch, someone he, at times, felt like he needed to pinch to make sure he was actually real.

He did.

“Ow.” Bruce Wayne looked up from his cards to him, his silver eyes, like bottomless midnight water, mirroring harassment and perplexity. John eyed him intently while he still could without question: he looked better than he had for the past couple of weeks, more colour in his face and less colour around his eyes. His visits had become more infrequent and jumbled recently; to John’s knowledge, he was (still) trying to rebuild his family business again. John and his ex-girlfriend, Harley Quinn, had killed all of Bruce’s workers and poisoned the halls with toxic gas, and it had left its lingering damage. To his understanding, the building had been blocked off for a few weeks to be thoroughly cleansed and examined, but, hollowed of life, it hadn’t circled back to its former glory upon reopening, and that had left an insufferable weight on Bruce’s shoulders.

Joker and his ex-girlfriend, John reminded himself dispassionately as he reflected on what had happened. Joker was another darker entity entirely, and Harley was a girlfriend from a separate lifetime. It had never felt right with her; kissing her, claiming he loved her, had felt like expecting to walk over smooth ground only to plunge suddenly into a cold abyss, the exact opposite of what he had thought kissing her and owning her would feel like. He wanted to think it was only because he didn’t actually love her and that he’d mistaken respect and fear for love, which was true; but the whole reason, he thought as he looked at Bruce’s stern mirror-like eyes and his fine, slashed eyebrows and his puckered moon of a mouth, was that–

Well, John thought solemnly. There was no need to dwell on that. Bruce had... forgiven him, per say – given him another chance to redeem himself and rekindle their relationship – but he couldn’t expect much more; he’d never truly forgive him for killing not just his workers but one of his family friends, and John found it in him to respect that. He’d rather have Bruce in a more detached way than before than not at all. Bruce was his only friend, really, and the thought of a world without him filled his mouth with a sour, ashy taste that made him want to spit. It was simply too agonising to bear.

“What?” Bruce asked now, eyeing him curiously over his cards. He looked so... uncharacteristically unguarded. Since he’d started juggling Arkham visits, his patrols and rebuilding Wayne Enterprises, he’d usually been too sullen and exhausted to put an effort into communication, even the drab, small kind, but today, on an uneventful, dreary Tuesday night, he’d shown up jovially with an unopened pack of cards with the price sticker still on them, looking... different, putting it quite mildly. Instead of being regally thrown together with his hair styled sideways impeccably, the silk hung over his face now, brushing his chipper eyes, and he just seemed so much lighter, somehow, but John couldn’t explain it. They were playing cards in the rec room on a chipping white table, and Bruce was the subject of unavoidable attention. Although he never smiled, Bruce radiated such positive energy that he barely seemed to notice the cluster of glares around him. The inmates were restless in his presence, not forgetting his father, Thomas Wayne, and what he’d done. “Your go.” He slapped down a card.

John looked mournfully at his crappy hand. He had half the mind to surrender, but unfortunately that wasn’t how the game worked; instead, he shook his head, signalling he didn’t want the top card on the face-up pile, and watched Bruce pick it up and tuck it into his hand before slapping his spare card onto the face-down pile in between them, face-up. He’d won. Unsurprised, John watched Bruce spread his flush of cards over the table. 2, 3 and 4 of Diamonds; 7, 8, 9 and 10 of Spades. John slapped down his inferior hand and shuffled the entire deck, puckering his lips irritably. “You got good, buddy,” he observed suspiciously. “Were you holding out on me before?”

Bruce shrugged sheepishly and accepted the cards that he was dealt quietly. Conversation had never really been Bruce’s strong suit, especially when he was either pensive, tired or miserable; John had observed and mentally recorded that. He wondered which of the three he was right now – maybe all three of them – but he was certainly one of them.

Bruce looked thoughtfully at his cards before he looked at him over them. Then, suddenly, he grinned. There was something inexplicably feral about the gesture, like a lion sniffing the air for its prey. It was the first time he’d ever grinned in front of him – a wholesome display of curling lips and flashing white teeth, very boyish, very pure, very unlike him. John had to tell himself not to fall off his chair in astonishment. Bruce tucked his un-styled hair behind his ear with a soft swipe of his wrist and leaned closer reticently. “That girl over there thinks you’re cute,” he murmured in a pouty, resigned voice.

The girl in question? That was unclear. ‘Over there’ could refer to anywhere; there were girls specked sporadically around the room.

“Where?” John asked curiously, but, as he scanned the room for the accused girl to have a brief look at her, he felt warm fingertips press against his pulse, which, quite inconveniently, chose that moment to start sprinting athletically. He looked up, startled. Bruce was touching his wrist; he was leaning closer. John could see himself reflected in the other man’s irises, like a reflection set on the surface of water, and Bruce’s eyes seemed to have the same dreamy ripple, the same elegant movement... He resisted the natural urge to recoil from the gesture; after all, it was shockingly unfamiliar. His skin prickled with electricity where he was being touched.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Bruce asseverated, rubbing his thumb in distracting circles. “Buddy,” he added tenderly, and John almost literally melted into his chair. The nickname, his nickname for Bruce, sounded so endearing on Bruce’s tongue, so sweet, like deliquesced sugar. John didn’t know how he’d managed to make a platonic term sound so sensual, but he had, and his bones gave way to liquid.

“Yeah?” John rejoined quietly. The tender synapses in his brain were frayed. “I mean – really? What about, buddy?”

“I think I like the old you _much_ better.” Bruce’s fingers were creeping up his wrist casually: his exploring fingertips were sliding with feathery pressure against his pale skin without a slither of shame, following the branches of his blue-purple veins, hitching up his ripped Arkham sleeve.

“What?” John mustered ineloquently, because, well – _surely not_? Bruce’s fingers had found the crease of his inner elbow now, and John’s mouth dried up, his tongue fluffy all the way down his throat. Maybe he was misinterpreting things – it wasn’t exactly an uncommon mistake of his – or – or – well, anything, really. Anything sounded more sane than Bruce ( _Batman_ ) trying to tell him he preferred the monster he had been that had killed a friend of Martha and Thomas Wayne with so many innocent people on the side. It was just too bizarre.

“You know, Alfred once told me I have bad taste in men,” Bruce said quietly as he stroked his inner arm. John doubted Alfred had ever said anything of the sort, but his synapses were beyond frayed and were now dissipating, “but I think I just have a taste for bad men.” He chewed his lip. “That pink eyeshadow, slicked-back hair, I want-to-kill-you look? It was kind of hot. Bad-boy hot.”

“Oh, I get it.” John smiled. The gesture was edged with tension. “Dr Leland set this up, right? To make sure I won’t succumb to temptation under pressure and slip back into The Joker? Always thinking, that woman!” He moved his wrist; he didn’t want to be touched by anyone for the sake of a social experiment, but tried to diffuse the hurt in his voice and expression generously as Bruce shot him an inquisitive look. “That’s kind of clever, buddy.”

Bruce shook his head like he was physically trying to remove the assumption from his hippocampus. “Joker, I’m being serious,” he insisted. He was using that voice he used on women at social events to charm them stupid, all in the name of his playboy mask, and it stopped John short: husky and persuasive and smooth, it sounded remarkable inside John’s befuddled head. “Do you have any idea what we could do together? What we could be?”

“I’m not allowed to hear that name,” John murmured evasively while the name tauntingly tolled in the back of his head like an opulent clock.

“What, _your_ name?” Bruce laughed fleshly. “That’s stupid.”

“Bruce, what are you trying to-”

But Bruce suddenly swivelled his head around, staring unseeingly at the door, and John broke off to follow his gaze in surprise. Nothing.

“Bruce,” John said in vexation. “Buddy. Are you listening to me?”

“I need the toilet.” Bruce stood up abruptly, and, with an unfair flourish, he set off at a brisk pace to the toilet, leaving John feeling discombobulated and alone.

Bruce was acting strangely. John was still woolly with medication, but he wasn’t drugged enough to miss _that_. Everything was just obscurely off about him, and not just in his attitude but his physical appearance. John wondered. Bruce wouldn’t take drugs – John knew he wouldn’t. He rarely drank; he was Batman, and drinking was about as doltish as decisions could get. Somehow, John felt the difference went beyond any kind of intoxication – somehow, he sensed something was just completely, terribly wrong. He tried to muster an idea of what could possibly be wrong with his best friend, but Bruce took that moment to re-enter, looking more wild than before. He was being escorted by a burly, flesh-headed worker who looked bored and underpaid.

Bruce sat down, flustered. The high colour in his cheeks didn’t flatter the pouchy circles around his eyes. John noticed with a keen, icy interest that his hair was styled again, swept sideways, not a strand out of place.

“That was quick,” John remarked, addled. “Which toilet did you go to, buddy?”

Bruce gave him a perplexed look as he leaned his briefcase, made of rich brindled leather, against his chair. John wondered distantly if it was his father’s. All he knew was that Bruce hadn’t left with it, or come in with it originally. “Sorry I’m late, John,” he said breathlessly as he adjusted his wet sleeve cuffs. He himself looked wet, and John could hear rain on the rooftop now, striking it like tiny pebbles. “I didn’t keep an eye on the time – I’ve been at Wayne Enterprises, filing job applications.” He looked up at John’s expression, did a double-take, and looked dully puzzled. “Is something wrong?” he asked, the muscles under his muted skin unconsciously pulled taut and alert. It was The Bat wearing through the man.

“But, buddy,” John drawled, befuddled and aching from the inside of his skull to his stomach, “you were right here.”

Bruce looked worried now in a way John hated; it took a lot to make Bruce Wayne look worried, certainly, and Bruce was looking at him now like he had blood on his fingers or was an amnesia patient who had just confessed he didn’t know who he was. There was a spark of careful intelligence in his eyes, a sort of distorted understanding. _He thinks I’m hallucinating or I’m confused or something_. “John,” he said slowly, like he was giving John time to process and understand, “I only just got here.”

John considered that, then opened his mouth to protest decidedly, but a slither of movement caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He looked and there, stood in the doorway, was Bruce Wayne, staring dispassionately at his twin. On the other hand, the Bruce opposite John was suddenly wan, bleaching the colour of his eyes in contrast. And the confusion managed to somehow overcome the apprehension, drawing his train of thought to a fuzzy blank.

Finally, as the guards, inmates, John and Bruce alike stared, the figure in the doorway sighed like there was a great inconvenience and pocketed a plastic phone. “Oh, you, you, you,” he exhaled disdainfully, practically tutting at Bruce like a chiding guardian. “You are a real inconvenient pain in the ass.”

Bruce stood up quickly, knocking over his chair which skidded a small distance away, but in the blink of an eye, the man in the doorway was gone. Instantly, he sprinted after him, and John followed without thinking about it. He was slow – too slow – and he lost sight of Bruce before the chase had really even begun. A guard caught up with him in the end, but even she looked too stumped to do much besides take John almost tenderly by the elbow.

“Did I take too much cocaine or did I really just see Bruce Wayne run after Bruce Wayne?”

John looked at her but he didn’t say anything. He was suddenly enervated.

Looking distinctly upset, Dr Leland appeared. Her hair was scraped to the back of her head in a knot; it had grown somewhat since he’d last been in the asylum, no longer a bob framing her shoulders, but she wore it up almost always anyway. The tightness of the bun seemed to be pulling back her scalp and pinching her face, which was an almost blanched colour, as blanched as it could be. Her eyes stood out unattractively in contrast. “John,” she said softly. He was her favourite patient and she was his favourite doctor. She was the only sane one with compassion intact, frankly, and John had taken to her the day she’d started working in the asylum. “Come on.” She held her hand out, beckoning him to her. The guard let go of him immediately. “You must be in shock. We can go to my office and practise your breathing exercises, okay?”

John wasn’t in shock, and he certainly didn’t want to practise his breathing exercises. Physically, he was in that corridor, staring at his favourite doctor, but mentally he was with Bruce Wayne, _The Batman_ , on a wild goose chase, air in his eyes and hair, eyes on the target. Thousands of possibilities about what had just happened came and went, but left one common question: Who had that man been?

Dr Leland was looking at him patiently, and, finally, he looked back and saw her, _really_ saw her. That was when he (finally) forced a smile and a chuckle. “Coming, Doc!” 

***

  
“Perhaps you could go in something less drab this time, sir?” said Alfred, not without humour.

Bruce turned to face him, his lips twitching. He faced away from the mirror in his bedroom, gilded, that had showed him the shadow of a man in cladded black. Today, even his shirt was black. Sometimes, people liked to jest his clothing shade tended to reflect his mood, and, for the first time, he considered that. He was certainly in a fouler mood than he had been for a while. He had been ever since that night two weeks ago when a man had walked in donning his face. Quite cowardly, he’d not visited John since, dreading what the creature of manipulation had told him or even asked him while assuming his character. Bruce had chased the mysterious man out into the night, but, with the rain shedding so thickly, like a bleary lens of tears frosting his vision, he’d lost him almost instantly to the shadows. He’d never been so frustrated at a failed chase – this was personal. Just the thought that a man was going around wearing his face, impersonating everything from his voice to his speech, having so much power over Bruce’s image, was enough to make Bruce feel caged in his own skin with rage. He wanted to peel the skin back from his bones and escape.

“Are you sure I can’t get out of it?”

Alfred looked outside at the guests dribbling inside the manor, colourful umbrellas bobbing over their heads like bursting flowers. It was raining again, just like that night. Bruce turned away from the thought. “It would be rude to not show up to your own charity gala, Master Wayne,” he pointed out, not unreasonably. “Perhaps, if you dropped unnecessary nightly activities, you would not be so drained.”

“Alfred,” Bruce warned, too horribly exhausted for arguing. To his credit, Alfred turned away before an argument could rouse and pretended to be folding already folded clothes draped over the end of Bruce’s bed. Namely, they were white shirts Bruce had felt too glum to wear.

“Your guests will expect you downstairs soon,” Alfred commented, still folding the shirts. There were lines of tension cording his shoulders. “Perhaps you should be on your way, sir.”

“Perhaps,” Bruce agreed quietly, mostly to just roll the word around on his tongue for the sake of doing something. He felt terribly estranged. He’d never felt this way about anything before. “Are you coming?”

Alfred smiled the ghost of a smile at him, a smile that assured him that, eventually, they’d be okay. “Eventually,” he promised.

That was all the assurance he needed. With a polite smile, Bruce turned and walked out the door.

  
***

Bruce spent a good hour greeting guests, offering them champagne more expensive than their month’s rent and offering around a few courteous dances. Of course, he was also asked, mostly by young women, and, graciously, he accepted every time. No sooner had he started to dance with a brunette was he dancing with a petite blonde girl with drawn-on eyebrows, emphasised black lips and a skimpy Gothic dress paired with clunky leather boots. He wouldn’t look at her, and not because he was being discriminative against her sense of dress. She was young, maybe too young to have alcohol on her breath, and she was getting very strange with her hands.

“Excuse me? Please can I cut in?”

Bruce turned to look at the man who’d spoken in surprise. He was tall, though no taller than Bruce: probably six foot or so. He had tawny skin and dark brown hair and was wearing an unstylish brown suit that looked cheap and worn past its youth. “Yes, of course,” he said politely, but the man wasn’t looking at him; he was looking at the woman.

“I was talking to you, sweetheart.”

The woman looked both confused and harassed. Her cheeks flamed up with colour under her pasty makeup. “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, baby, please. If you were begging, you’d be on your knees.” The man took one of Bruce’s hands, assuming a dancer’s stance, and a dominant one at that. Bruce was too surprised to reject the casual contact. “Hello, darling,” he greeted quietly, steering him away from the woman who stared after them in amazed puzzlement. “Have you been having fun?”

Speechless, Bruce stared at him. There was something familiar yet unfamiliar about his voice, his long jawline, his wild eyebrows, even his hands, one folded firmly around his. There were scars randomly speckling his spidery fingers, Bruce observed despite himself, that were very similar to his own. Under the spicy, cheap smell of aftershave, Bruce could detect a hint of smoke and cinnamon.

“The champagne is absolutely phenomenal,” the man continued, undeterred by his silence. People were starting to stop dancing in favour of staring, and Bruce felt a very distant and very quickly receding sliver of alarm scorching the lining of his stomach. He wondered what people would say about the fact he was dancing intimately with another man, but, in a more forward part of his mind, he wondered what was so familiar about the delicate arch of the man’s throat, peeking out from a pink collar. There was a splotch of either blood or wine on the fraying rim of it. “You must simply introduce me to your dealer, darling. The taste reminds me of Paris, you see, and the pastel azure of the sky in the afternoon-”

_“John?”_

The man’s eyes glittered in his browned face like poisonous water. Pretence of normalcy forgotten, he leaned closer like a secret. His breath smelt sour, so different from John’s own. “Guess again,” he murmured, his voice as silky as satin and wrapping Bruce as delicately as so. “Better than John,” he hinted assuredly.

It clicked. This wasn’t John, no; he believed that. Standing in front of him was the very man that he had lost in the rain, the one that had sported his face in Arkham Asylum; the man that had tried to manipulate himself into John’s darkest desires that had been cleverly hidden with the help of medication and Dr Leland. Bruce could almost feel rage and disgust as a live thing inside him as he stared at the creature now donning his best friend’s face. Everything else fell away into a camera-lens blur, the man coming into a sharper, more detailed focus, and he forgot how to function, how to _breathe_ , shutting down completely. He’d imagined plenty of things he would do when finally getting his hands on this man, and now the time had come he didn’t know which or what to do. Nothing violent – Bruce Wayne shouldn’t have a violent part of him, he reminded himself sternly.

_Don’t make a scene. You are Bruce Wayne, a stupid, weak businessman. You cannot make a scene._

Bruce tightened his hand around his, stilling. The man’s brown suit seemed so strange on John’s skin, so bleached of colour, so harsh against a backdrop of chalk-white, and Bruce tried not to think about how he might have acquired the outfit. It didn’t help the burning sensation in his midriff. “You,” he spat.

The man – the creature – tutted at him disapprovingly. He was using John’s voice in a way John never used it, with silky, cloy, cocky smoothness and something akin to careful seduction. “Such impolite savagery,” he taunted. “I thought you would be pleased to see me. I’m _hurt_. Weren’t you scouring for me day and night as though hopelessly in love with me like in Cinderella, _Bruce Wayne_?” He said his name like it was fine, powdered poison, through a straight set of teeth – John’s teeth. “Well, here I am. Your own beautiful nightmare in the flesh. Your own devilish Cinderella.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Bruce forced out through his teeth. The urge to haul him outside by the flesh pouching the back of his neck, like a kitten, was so powerful his hands shook. Instead, he focused on dancing again; them standing motionlessly in the centre of a gaggle of dancers was earning a few stares, or maybe that was a matter of their gender. “Assuming another man’s face during conversation... Are you really that cowardly?” he sneered now, wanting to destroy this man in the only way he could. Personal. This was still personal. And now he was wearing _John’s_ face...

The man’s hand tightened around his with surprising strength. Bruce’s skin thrummed with pain. He hid his grimace expertly. “Don’t assume,” the man said, slowly, softly, “to understand, Mr. Wayne.” He flattered him with a brilliant smile, the anger dissipating from his eyes like tepid water from a pierced water bottle, just like that. “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“What?”

“The obvious questions!” the creature rejoined cheerfully. “‘Who are you?’, ‘What do you want?’, ‘Where are you hiding?’, ‘What are you?’, ‘How did you get here?’”

Feeling like he was being made a mockery, Bruce snapped, “Would you tell me?” without hope, more to prove a point than anything else.

“Well, no,” the creature admitted with the same assured cheer woven around his voice, and Bruce gave him a pointed look, “but what’s a vocal first meeting between villain and hero without unanswered questions? I need to be a mystery.”

“Get to the point.”

Now it was the creature’s turn to blink. “What?”

“Don’t tell me you came here to dance with me and indulge in my champagne.”

An equal mixture of amusement and bitterness etched the creature’s face. “Oh, very well,” he sighed lightly. “Though dancing with Gotham’s most eligible bachelor _was_ a pleasant bonus, and the champagne really was marvellous.”

Bruce stared. He wondered if this man was human, or had been human once, with extraordinary circumstances; he also wondered if this was a creature born to both the art of shape-shifting and manipulation, which barely seemed possible. He could process giant men and purple-skinned men in tubes, because, really, that was just science. He couldn’t blame shape-shifting on science, though, which was all he knew. He felt suddenly very tired.

“Oh, relax.” With a slender thumb, the man traced his eyebrow softly, which was apparently warped in distress. “Soon, I’ll be out of your hair, and then you can go back to melting zippers and panties for miles over glasses of flowery champagne.”

Incredulously, Bruce said, “I can’t just let you leave.”

“You’re going to have to, I’m afraid.” The creature’s eyes flashed. “Do you like puzzles?”

Bruce paused. “What?”

“Puzzles. Do you like them?” He didn’t wait for a response, tripping over his own words in his haste to get them out. “Because our time together, sweetheart, will be a puzzle, and an arcane one at that: no picture on the front of the box, no single idea what the finished product will look like, the finale at the end. The puzzle of my life, in fact – the puzzle that shows how deeply you wronged me, divided in sections that once broke my heart. Can you handle that?”

“And if I refuse to... to play?” Bruce muttered through numb lips.

The man pressed his mouth against Bruce’s ear, and Bruce had the savage, alarming thought that this was what it would feel like to have John so close, and hot blood seared him from his ears to his cheekbones to his throat. His hands shook violently now. They’d always been as steady as a heartbeat. “Then I can’t promise you the next time you see Tiffany, Alfred or John, even Selina Kyle, they’ll have a heartbeat.” He leaned back calmly, like he hadn’t just threatened Bruce’s entire family, and stuck out his hand. “So – do you assent to play with me?”

Then he smiled, and Bruce thought it was what a spider’s smile would look like every time another naive insect fell tangled into their intricate web. He was the insect, thrashing against the sticky silk listlessly, and, somehow, in such an abrupt space of time, the man was the spider, staring at him devilishly from his position of his superiority. Bruce was, in fact, so deeply tangled he didn’t know where the exit was. He knew one thing: the man wasn’t bluffing. If he didn’t build the puzzle, play the game, everyone he loved would turn up dead.

The man’s hand was clammy and soft with makeup.

“So, the game begins,” he purred, and then he disappeared, leaving Bruce alone with a memory card in his curled fist.  
***  
His vision was starting to blur, words dancing onscreen like they were alive. He’d plugged the memory card given to him by the strange man into the computer in the cave a few hours ago, but so far he’d run into countless errors and no idea of how to crack them. Nothing he did seemed to wheedle the contents of the card out. In red block letters, ‘ERROR’ striped over the screen again, flashing in a way that drove pain behind his eyes, and he had to turn away.

Alfred was approaching him, a tray of tea balanced precariously in his wizened hands. “Tea, sir?”

Bruce almost smiled. Alfred insisted most things could be made better with tea. With a sharp pierce of longing, Bruce thought how he desired that to be true at the moment. “Thank you, Alfred.” He heard the weariness in his voice as he reached out for the tea and took a grateful sip. It had the rich essence of alcohol. Then he really did smile. “I needed this.”

“Have you made any progress yet, Master Bruce?” Alfred asked, obviously trying his best to push aside his conviction against Batman for Bruce’s sake. Bruce seriously could have cried; he was so tired.

“No. The Computer keeps saying ‘error’, again and again, like clockwork. I haven’t figured out a way to get past it.”

“Perhaps,” said Alfred, “it would be best to just buy the camera it belonged to.”

Bruce blinked at him in surprise. “Do you think that’s all I can do?”

“It would be the most simple way to get around the problem, Master Bruce,” Alfred confirmed, putting the tray down. On it was also a plate of homemade cookies, fluffy and moistened by melted chocolate chips. Bruce’s childhood favourite. The cold stone in his gut thawed. “Are you sure doing what this man says is a good idea, Bruce? You don’t know the first thing about him.”

Bruce sighed and turned back to the computer. He’d been asking himself that since the gala, but he knew he couldn’t run the risk of casualties, not innocent ones, not loved ones. “You know I have no choice, Alfred,” he said. “He said this puzzle will teach me about him and – and how I wronged him.”

“Maybe it was something your father did,” suggested Alfred, sounding resigned. “Many hold grudges against you for that.”

“Maybe,” agreed Bruce, his heart not in it. “I’ll ask Tiffany to try crack this while I go to the closest electronic shop and try buy a camera that matches the card.”

“Someone called you, Master Bruce, while you were working. They left a voice mail.”

“Mm?” Bruce didn’t turn around. He suspected it was business, something drab he’d attend to later, and held no interest in it.

“It – It was John, Bruce. He... He was released from Arkham earlier this morning.”

 

 


	2. Photogenic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John is out of Arkham, but that's the least of Bruce's worries: he's got a memory card in his possession that could be a piece to the puzzle.

  
**August, 27 – 8.02pm**

_John, it’s Bruce. I’m sorry I didn’t answer your call; I was working on... something. Where are you? Are you safe?_

‘Where are you hiding? Are you getting into trouble?’

**August, 28 – 10.38am**

_Hey, John. I don’t know if you’re getting these messages, but when and if you do, can you call me back? Or at least pick up the phone?_

‘You need to contact me so I know you haven’t gone back on our agreement.’

**August, 28 – 6.56pm**

_John, you know you can stay with me, right? I have over 100 guest bedrooms. I wanted to ask you before, but... Never mind. Do you have somewhere else to go? Call me back._

‘I need to keep an eye on you.’

Sitting on a roof, a shattered brown slant like the slope of naked hill, in the putrescent heart of Gotham, John listened to the voicemails Bruce had left on his phone over the past two days, reading what he perceived to be between the lines as he practically whitened (more) with irascibility – his eyes seemed to unattractively bulge against the colour of his skin, he saw disinterestedly; he was looking lividly into a spreading rain puddle expanding next to him, groping desperately for his already chilled, nerveless fingers. His knuckles popped as he clenched his hand around his phone, thinking involuntarily about how he had always compared Bruce’s eyes to water painted by moonlight, or rain splashed against an oval of pavement: they were silver and rippling, and he always managed to drown in them. He turned away from the thought now – and, as he literally turned, saw a dark figure, hunched against the rain, sliding his way through the street, looking like an ink-dot in the near distance. John could see he was willowy and dressed finely, all gilded buttons and expensive black material, and he felt a pang. It was Bruce; he knew it was; he was as familiar as the back of his hand; John had a violent flashback to the first time he’d observed the way Bruce walked, all trained grace despite his height and muscle. He had a knack for showing up whenever John was pensive about him, like he was now, typically when he was troubled and the sight of him crumpled his insides like deflated balloons.

Part of him wanted to run up to him and throw his arms around him with buckling enthusiasm – he wondered if he smelt good in the rain. He’d only held his best friend once what felt like an eternity ago, and it had felt as good as he’d always thought it would, even if the gesture had been somewhat brief and somewhat one-sided. Bruce’s heartbeat was the most steady thing in John’s life – slow, rhythmic, strong, powering on like a great race horse. But he wouldn’t and couldn’t, not while he was still a temple for this rotten rage inside him. He was always unpredictable when he was like this; this was the same irrational rage he’d schlepped during his brief time as The Joker, revived from an ember of anger that had been caused by something, quite frankly, not worth a killing spree over, that had inexplicably smouldered into a flame he couldn’t control.

_I can’t lose control again. He’d never forgive me. There has to be an explanation for this – insecurity, just like before._

John told himself this vehemently as he dropped from the roof, jarring his knees. If Bruce heard, who was a respective distance away, he didn’t turn. The rain was shedding ruthlessly on Gotham, like she was weeping despondently for John’s internal suffering, and it rattled hard against the pavement, choking up the grates. The tarmac rivers – endless city sidewalks twisting and turning whenever he faced – that flanked him were blackened by dampness as he picked his way across them, his hands in his close-fitting jacket, towards Bruce’s quickly receding figure. He tailed him with graceful succession and predator watchfulness until he walked past an alleyway, when he grabbed Bruce by the shoulder, feeling him tense under his hand, and pulled him into the alley, into a yawn of gaping darkness.

Something – an elbow, a fist, a foot, a knee, he didn’t see which – jammed into his stomach, and he gagged, hunching over. He felt something, presumably an elbow, assault his back, and he buckled, sprawling and eating grit, spitting and swearing. Belatedly, he realised how stupid it was to grab Bruce Wayne of all people without warning him first, and, feeling sorry for himself, he spat blood. Oh well. It was too late now.

Importantly, to his own credit, he didn’t retaliate, involuntarily or otherwise.

_“John?”_ Pushing his wet hair out his eyes – his hood had fallen back during the assault – Bruce stared at him in astonishment, looking uncharacteristically unarmed. John feared for a moment it was the strange man from Arkham, because that was the only other time he’d seen him stripped of his defences, but the guard came back up with a snap, and the vulnerability dashed away simultaneously until there was nothing left but a blank slate. He blinked as he observed chidingly, “You grabbed me.”

John got up slowly, flexing his sore muscles. Pain thrummed through him, slow but sure, like the beat of a separate heart. One thing John had always given Bruce credit for was his ability to fight and defend – but only when he wasn’t on the receiving end of it. Sniffing sourly, he bristled, “I didn’t expect you to get _physical_!”

“Sorry.” Bruce didn’t sound very sorry. He looked a little dazed. Actually, he looked almost entirely out of it, like John had interrupted something of significant importance and personal impact – or like he was intoxicated. His hand was curled tightly around something, his veins standing on end.

Driven by some unknown, buried compulsion, a voice in his head that whispered between the littered web of his shattered thoughts, he backed Bruce up against the slick alley wall, who took in a sharp inhalation of breath in surprise but, surprisingly, allowed it (allowing it simply meaning he didn’t dig his elbow into his jugular but stared at him in favour) – John almost took a surprised breath himself. He caged Bruce between his arms, his hands flat against the wall, and felt heat rolling off him in tangible waves, his steady heartbeat beating slowly under his.

Bruce wasn’t alarmed. Good to know.

Their height difference didn’t matter. Somehow, John managed to feel inches taller than he actually was, and Bruce seemed suddenly a lot smaller. Though he wasn’t alarmed, tepid confusion glittered in the billionaire’s eyes.

“Your voicemails-” John broke off, trying to string together words that could explain the inexplicable, blistering crest of anger marring his stomach lining. The words wouldn’t come. Ineloquently, he moved his mouth with no ramification as Bruce stared at him with stretched patience, awaiting the return of his eloquence. Doctors aside, Bruce had always been the most patient person in his life. “Well,” he diverted lamely, “I’m here now.” His voice sounded slightly sulky in his ears. “So you can keep an eye on me.”

Bruce’s eyebrows drew towards the centre of his forehead. He didn’t keep eye contact – he had difficulty with that, too, just like he had problems with expressing himself – as he said, questioningly, “John, you don’t... you don’t think I’m trying to keep tabs on you because of... because of Joker, do you?”

John was baffled. “Well, aren’t you, bu – Bruce?”

“No. I was... concerned about whether you had a place to stay, John. That’s all. And I wanted – want – you to come live with me, if you have nowhere else to go. You’re good company, John.”

“Oh.” John didn’t know what to do with this information. It was so far from what he’d been mulling over, and the contrast gave him an almost panicky, frustrated feeling to have to reassemble what he thought he knew. Giggles bubbled up his throat hysterically. He had to turn away and wrap his arms around himself. He didn’t want Bruce to see him like this – vulnerable. Bruce was never vulnerable, so John felt ashamed to succumb to something his best friend rarely ever had.

Bruce’s hand on his shoulder steadied him. His hands were, in society, imperfect – scarred and pale, they were the hands of a criminal boxer, not a billionaire playboy. But with one touch, John felt the panicky, frustrated feeling quell softly. “Take your time, John,” he finally prompted as John turned to look at him.

“I’m okay.” Clenching and unclenching his fists as he breathed to make absolutely sure, John smiled. He was sure. He was calm again, and how strange was that? Human contact could do what Arkham medicine, most of the time, couldn’t. No, that was too broad of a term, ‘human’ – _Bruce’s_ contact. “Thanks, buddy.”

“No problem, John.” Bruce backed up, putting a respectful amount of space between them again. John felt the loss like it was physical; the shoulder where his hand had once rested felt sizzled out. “What are you doing out at this time of night?” If he was suspicious, it didn’t show, but, regardless, John dug his nails into his palms meditatively.

“Oh, you know – clearing the old cog wheel.” John tapped his temple with his right index finger before lifting his other hand unceremoniously. He unfurled it like a ripe flower, revealing, infused with his palm – he’d held it tightly – a memory card, sheened thinly by a fine layer of dust. “What’s this?”

Bruce opened his own hand where the memory card had once sat, looking – well – startled was the closest word for it. He blinked as he clenched and unclenched his hand, like he was testing to see if the memory card would materialise back into his hand, proving John was holding something different entirely, before he looked back at him. “How did you do that?”

“You didn’t answer my question, Bats.”

Bruce sighed, turning his head away. He stared out the alley as a white car, stained by – _something_ – glissaded down the frosty road, flashing their broken headlights sporadically ahead of them. He said nothing about the car like he’d expected him to as a subject change; instead, he explained everything – the gala, the creature, what it had said about ‘wronging’ him, the memory card, the computer errors, and, finally, Alfred’s ingenious, basic idea to buy a camera that matched the memory card. It looked like a strange memory card, though, nothing John had ever seen, and in Arkham he’d liked to tinker with things like broken phones and dead cameras as one of his activities all the time – he’d dealt with plenty of memory cards before.

“How you _wronged_ him?” John frowned, holding the memory card to the light, which was actually just a thin ribbon of moonlight peeking into the alley. “Buddy, you don’t think it was something your father did, do you?”

Bruce shook his head slowly, but his eyes were far away. He shoved his hand through his hair, mussing the onyx locks attractively. They almost seemed to blend into the darkness. He said tightly, “I don’t know. The way he looked at me – John, it was personal. But I’ve never – I’ve never wronged someone before, not to the degree of exacting revenge. Well... apart from you...”

“Well,” John reasoned calmly, “we just need to play his game, don’t we? Put the puzzle pieces together to find a sweet treat at the end. Then we’ll know.”

“ _We_?” Bruce sounded carefully blank.

John slitted his eyes. “Yes, we! I’m now working with you, buddy. You know, Bruce and John, John and Bruce, a team. We can take him down together!” At Bruce’s unconvinced look, he wheedled, “He tried to manipulate me, you know. Don’t I _deserve_ to be a part of this?” And his eyes flicked to the mouth of the alley. It would take two seconds to dart away at a running speed if he answered the next question wrongly. Maybe, if he had the element of surprise on his hand, he’d be able to keep to the shadows and lose him. But Bruce was the shadows, and the idea sounded daunting. But he’d outrun him in the past, hadn’t he? He didn’t have much strength, but he did have speed. “Don’t you trust me, Bruce? After everything you said, after everything we agreed on, you still don’t-”

“John,” Bruce exhaled, deflating – he really did look like a popped party balloon, which spawned the image of a pink helium balloon shaped as a bat; John almost giggled. “Of course I trust you.”

John blinked, startled. “You – You do?”

“Yes. I... I do believe you’re trying.” Bruce sounded tentative. A burst of sweet warmth, like his blood had been replaced with hot chocolate, adulterated his veins, making him feel unhealthily feeble. “Whatever that is worth... But... I like to work on my own.”

John stepped closer. He wanted to reach out and touch him so badly he ached, and now he was close enough to, not that he dared. “It can be a new experience,” he coaxed imploringly. “Dr Leland is always telling me to try new things – it keeps us refreshed spiritually.”

“This could be dangerous, John. I wouldn’t forgive myself if you got hurt.”

Sentimental pain prickled his heart, like the thorn of a rose piercing his skin. Now the urge to touch him was beyond aching – it was agonising. “I won’t, buddy. I’m stronger than you give me credit for.”

“I know you’re strong.”

John blinked. “You do?”

“Of course I do. Not just physically, but emotionally. You’ve bore the brunt of a lot of shit, John. But...”

John decided, if he allowed it, Bruce would list off infinite reasons why working together was a bad idea, apparently none of which being brittle trust. So, he turned on his heel and phlegmatically sauntered out the alley, a surprised Bruce hot on his heels. “This memory card is strange, buddy,” he observed. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

“Do you know anything about them?” Bruce asked, recovering, as he fell into step beside him.

“I used to dissect broken equipment at Arkham – phones, laptops, cameras. The guards and doctors would give me their stuff when it broke and wouldn’t sell, and I’d try fix the problem. It was very meditating, picking something apart and rebuilding it more gloriously than before.”

“I can only imagine.”

“I thought... Wait, I thought you built and fixed all your... you know... tech?”

“Well... Tiffany does now, but Lucius was always my tech guy.”

John swivelled his head to stare. “The friend that went out with a _bang_?”

Bruce’s face pinched. “Yes.”

“My entire life as I know it has been a lie.”

Shaking his head, Bruce evaded. “What’s so strange about it?”

“Everything – the thickness, the shape. I’d figure it’s a pretty uncommon camera.” John cut his gaze to the path ahead of them again. “Didn’t you say your computer is supposed to be able to hack into things like this?”

“Every memory card branded to the public.” Bruce shook his head soberly. “You’re right – it has to be an uncommon camera. One no one’s ever heard of before.”

“And you’re going sniffing around as Bruce Wayne?” John eyed him curiously. “It’s nighttime, buddy. What about The Bat? I thought this was his detective time.”

“Alfred prefers me to not get changed in the house when he’s there – he’s... well, he’s struggling to cope with... everything.”

“Oh.” John paused, remembering what Dr Leland had told him to do when people opened up. “Well, thanks for telling me, buddy.”

“This is it.” Bruce pointed. Ahead, bathed by flickering streetlamps, was a small electronics shop, TVs blinking static in their positions behind the front smudged windows. “The only electronics shop in Gotham.”

“The only one?” John eyed it doubtfully. It was dingy and squat, not looking very adequate at all.

“The others burned down within these past couple of days – arson, I’m presuming, but I’m still trying to prove it.”

“How are you going to do that?” John asked curiously as they approached the electronics shop, which, to John’s dull confusion, looked closed. The door was imprisoned by bars.

“Well, I read the files about the fire which tell me what colour the flames and the smoke were.”

John was puzzled. “Won’t they be orange and black?”

“Not necessarily. Blue flames paired with black smoke, for example, points to burning acetone. Yellow or white flames paired with grey or white smoke points to benzene. Pale yellow or white flames with brown or black smoke points to burning naphtha. White flames with white smoke points to phosphorous, so on. These are all fire accelerants that point to arson. In this case, yellow flames paired with grey smoke were recorded, which can mean either burning fabric or burning lacquer thinner.”

“What’s lacquer thinner?”

“It’s another accelerant. It speeds up the process of burning; simply putting it, it destroys evidence significantly quicker. People commit arson typically to collect insurance, but this time, well... it’s clearly so we go to the shop the man wants us to.”

“Oh. So, isn’t that case closed?”

“What?”

“Well, you can prove it’s arson, can’t you? From the lacquer thinner?”

“Not necessarily. First of all, that doesn’t identify the criminal. Second of all, I need to look at the seat of the blaze, where the heaviest concentration of ash is, which is where it all began, and determine whether or not there’s lacquer thinner or fabric fibres at the scene, which will determine whether it was a natural fire or not.”

“How do you do that?”

“I swab it and take it back to the Cave for analysis.”

“Oh. Well, surely it is arson, buddy? Not every electronics store can burst into flames in such a short amount of time, can they?”

“No, of course not, but we need evidence.”

“Isn’t coincidence evidence enough?”

“Coincidence is only suspicion,” Bruce countered. “It isn’t evidence. If Jim Gordon went to court with coincidence as evidence, he’d be laughed straight back out.”

“Have there been any deaths?”

“Yes. One death at every scene, charred to the point of unrecognition.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yes. Except one scene. There were two bodies found, side by side, locked in either an embrace or a struggle. Before death, in the case of a fire, the muscles... stiffen. Corpses assume the position they were in before-”

“Before becoming crispy joints of meat?”

Bruce shot him a disapproving look, but didn’t admonish him. “Yes. One of them has been identified using dental records – it was the store manager. His wife was hysterical. She said he was supposed to be working alone, which suggested the other corpse was either a secret lover or-”

“Or the killer.”

“Exactly.”

“So, have they identified the other man? Or woman? Or... whatever?”

“Not yet. But there was some blood found outside the shop – it could be anyone’s, but it was found on the top of the fence bordering the establishment, which suggests someone tried to climb it and got a nasty laceration on the way down.”

“How do they – you – take blood for sampling?” John stared at Bruce in fascination. His eyes burned with passion when he spoke about forensics in the same way a car-lover’s eyes burned when they spoke about cars. It was pleasant to look at, Bruce talking about something he so clearly – well – maybe not enjoyed but was invested in.

“Well, they use a swab – it’s a bit of cotton on the end of a wooden stick. You swab it, then put it in a tube, then snap the end of the stick off so you can seal the tube. You label it and take it away for examination.”

“Oh. I thought only fingertips were used.”

“Not necessarily, no. Anything can be used, really, to help solve a crime – fibres of fabric, grit, soil, skin, a piece of hair. Blood has their own print. The rarer the blood, the better – it singles out the people a lot quicker.”

“Does that always work?”

“No. If their blood has never been recorded, no match will come back. It’s the same with fingerprints. If they don’t have a history of a criminal record, their fingerprints will come back inconclusive.”

“Then what?”

“The examination of fibres and fingerprints.”

“How do you garner fingerprints?”

“Well... latent prints are effectively just prints of invisible sweat in the shape of a person’s fingerprints that are naked to the invisible eye, but, unless contaminated, stay there virtually forever. To take them away for comparison, they need to be lifted. The most common way to ‘lift’ latent prints is by dusting them – which means putting dust on them, not removing dust, which is actually just a fine powder. The powder reveals the papillary ridge marks of the fingertips. You lift the dust with transparent adhesive tape which is then stored onto a file card.” Bruce ducked into an alley, turning on John. The fire in his eyes was snuffing out. “You didn’t know any of that?”

“I did. I just like your voice when you’re talking about something you’re passionate about.”

Bruce went pink – _he went pink_ – but, as he opened his mouth, a car sped into the alley and parked next to them subserviently, sleek and long and black.

“Is that – Is that the _Batmobile_?” John sped towards it, not daring to touch her glossy coat. “ _The_ Batmobile?”

Bruce went over and opened the side of the car, revealing a hidden compartment and a line of Kevlar – the suit. A squeal gurgled up John’s throat, so he bit his lip, trying to seem professional. “Give me a moment?”

John turned away, bidding away seductive fantasies, and waited impatiently for Bruce to get dressed, listening to the soft clicks of the suit coming together as he wondered if he was as muscular as he looked. When he was finally given permission to turn, he was looking in awe at The Bat, which, even if he knew and trusted him, enveloped him in a thin fog of fear. “What about me?”

“What _about_ you?”

“Don’t I get a costume?”

“I don’t have anything with me.”

“But – But my identity!”

To this, Bruce – Batman – said nothing. “Come on,” he asserted blankly, turning his cowl-hidden face towards the shop. “The owner will be leaving soon.”

John was pouty as they slipped into the shop through the back, clinging to Batman’s cape as to not lose him in the shadows, but the petulance soon snapped back as he realised he was on a mission with _Batman_ , and not just as a small helping hand in the background like he had been when he’d given him the laptop, but as a sidekick. No, better than that – _his partner_.

The storage room was clotted by dust, which grimily filmed boxes of electronics to be taken into the store at a later time like a flimsy grey blanket. John told himself not to sneeze, and hoped with sheer will alone he could stop himself as they reached the door, listening to the store owner whistling off-tune on the other side. He couldn’t recognise the tune, but it sounded like a bizarre mixture of ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘Coming Down The Mountains’, and it drilled into him vexingly.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

***

Bruce opened the door, feeling John’s hands, like a child’s, holding the billow of his cape as he entered, making a noise to announce his awaited arrival. The store owner startled, jerkily throwing something over his shoulder that, fortunately, seemed to be a packet of jerky and not anything electronic-based.

The anxious, small, bald and round man, fat swelling over the waistband of his brown jeans and gaping the space between his shirt buttons, with askew glasses and bright blue eyes, whirled around to face them, his face wan with fear. His slightly-sloe eyes flicked between Bruce and his partner, whom he hadn’t assented to, but finally slid back to Bruce helplessly, stretched to their fullest possible size. “O-Oh!” He had a squeak of a voice. “I-I wasn’t aware you would be bringing more than just yourself, Mr. Batman. I only made tea for two people, you see?” Anxiously, he fumbled with two porcelain teacups as he pushed his glasses up his nose, sat prettily next to the till, that were streaming fine tendrils of flavoured steam. “Terribly sorry.”

“I don’t want tea. I want-”

“I do!” John sounded cheerful. “Ooh, I’ll have his! I’m parched!”

Bruce cut him a sharp glance, and, though John cowered, it didn’t have the desired effect; when it was held out, John reached greedily for the teacup.

The man pushed his glasses up his nose again, his hand shaking. His voice had a similar tremor as he questioned, “Someone you saved tonight, Batman?”

John looked affronted. Dangerous fire sparked in his eyes; his face twisted as he snarled, “I’m his _partner_.”

“John,” Bruce barked. John fell silent, sheepishly sipping his tea, as Bruce silently promised him with his eyes they’d be having words later. “I came about the memory card I contacted you about. Can you have a look at it? You claim to remember everything you sell and to every person.”

“Yes, yes,” the anxious man buzzed as he took the card off John, giving it an intricate assessment. “I have a fine photographic memory. Yes, I remember this memory card indeed. How... interesting. It’s quite puzzling it came into your possession, actually.”

“How so?”

“Well, this memory card is one of a kind, dear Bat! One I have been looking for, for quite a while, too!” the man cried with ardour, entering the storage room with a flourish. Bruce followed briskly, hearing John sneeze softly some proximity behind him. “And the camera is even more unique.”

“Really?” Bruce prompted.

“It was made not in a factory by any company. You can buy it nowhere else. It was made by a man, who liked to build and tinker in his lifetime, for his boy some twenty years ago.”

“Even the memory card?”

“He made the entire thing from scratch. It took him a very long time, it did. He’d always adored that boy. But where did I put it...? Ah.” He plucked a box from a shelf, nearly dropping it on his head, and put it on the floor with a gruff grunt of effort. Opening it up while peeling back tissues of bubble wrap, he exposed a camera that didn’t look like anything special, but was allegedly one of a kind. “Here it is. Isn’t it lovely?”

“How much are you selling it for?”

“Selling it?” The man frowned delicately. “I’m not selling it. It’s art, not a plain old camera, Bat.”

Bruce swallowed a bout of impatience. “I need it.”

“Why?”

And, before Bruce could respond, John dived in, pointing his finger at the man, his face contorted by anger. “Do you know who you’re talking to? Let me ring some bells. Gotham’s Knight? The greatest detective? You’re asking the wrong questions, _buddy_ -”

“Thank you, John,” Bruce interrupted crisply. “That’s enough.”

“D-Deeply sorry for my rudeness,” the man fumbled, wringing his hands.

“I just want to borrow it,” Bruce conceded. “I’ll bring it back when I’m done, safe and sound.”

“Oh, all right.” Miserably, the man handed the box over, looking it over with tender affection. Bruce couldn’t help but note, despite his claim of possession and love over it, the box was covered in dust and had quite apparently not been touched in a very long time. “But don’t break it, will you, Bats?”

“Can you tell me anything about the boy this camera was made for, Mr Debris?” Bruce garnered, giving the box to John to hold who theatrically made a show of pretending to stagger around with it due to great weight. The box was actually relatively weightless. “What he looked like, what he acted like?”

“Not much,” said Debris pensively. “He only ever came in once, he did, but he was a weedy boy. Black hair, pale skin, dressed exquisitely – a rich boy, you understand. You know how they are, dressing pompously for every occasion to flash their wealth to the world.”

Bruce said nothing.

“Anyway, he was quiet; shy. He clung to his father, didn’t say anything at all. Heard a rumour he died, though, poor sod. Can’t say I wish I was him, not at all. Why do you want to know?”

“Thank you for the loan,” said Bruce evasively. “I’ll bring the camera back as soon as I’m done.”

“Yes, please do,” Debris replied distantly, turning to tinker with what appeared to be a dissected phone. “Thank you for coming, Batman and Friend.”

And, without another word that could be spoken, Batman and Friend were gone.

***

“Did you find a camera then, sir?” asked Alfred as he entered the Cave, wielding a tray of coffee and sandwiches. If he was surprised to see John busily fanboying over every physical aspect of the Cave in visible sight, he professionally didn’t reveal it, shooting his cuffs smartly as soon as the tray was down next to Bruce on a small fold-out table. “And was Debris as useful as he proclaimed to be?”

“He didn’t know much,” Bruce admitted, dressed now in a black button-up and a pair of dark jeans to compliment; he was feeling sullen. “Just that the camera was made by a rich man for their rich son as a gift.”

“That doesn’t narrow down things much, does it, sir?”

“No, but if the shapeshifter is the man or the child, it tells us he was in a position of wealth – but Debris claimed the boy to be dead.”

“The father, then?”

“Yes,” Bruce said quietly. “That does seem like the most probable answer, doesn’t it?”

John was in front of them now, and he was pointing at the sandwiches, his eyes significantly brighter than usual. “Are some of those for me?”

Alfred had the grace to look sheepish, despite his feelings for John. Always a butler, he was, ready to serve. “I wasn’t aware you were here, Master John,” he admitted as John glowed at the term ‘master’. “I can go make you some, if you’re hungry.”

“He can have mine. I’m not hungry.” And, ignoring Alfred’s sharp look of concern, Bruce pushed the memory card into the camera, plugging it with a cable he’d found in the box into the Batcomputer.

On the computer, square video files came up, each with innocent-looking thumbnails. On one, he saw a weedy, black-haired boy of Debris’ description, and he clicked on it with haste, loading a video of a seemingly pure setting, a boy sitting in the grass outside his house picking at a toy truck as it rolled over the grass.

“What have you got there, bud?” a voice said from behind the camera, which was being held by a shaky, amateur hand.

“A truck.” The boy looked up. In his chalky face, his grey eyes seemed almost coal-black. “You bought it for me.”

“Why did I do that?”

“It’s my birthday.”

“It is indeed. Happy birthday, Squirt.”

“Thanks, Daddy. When’s cake time?”

“Cake comes after dinner.”

“Awww. But-”

“It’s mac and cheese – your favourite. Yeah, that’s what I thought.” The man behind the camera laughed gruffly. “That perked you up, didn’t it?”

In the background, the faint voice of a woman called them both in for dinner. Her voice was relatively dainty.

“Do you have anything to say to the camera?”

“No, but it should have something to say to me!”

“What’s that?”

“Happy birthday.”

The footage cut out, so, with a tight chest, Bruce moved on to the other videos in the same setting, just outside their house in the grass of their front yard – there was another happy birthday video, a video of his first day of school, a video of him successfully reciting all of his ABCs, sentimental videos like that that seemed too personal to look at.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir,” admitted Alfred from behind his chair. “What did he possibly hope to accomplish by showing you this?”

“Maybe,” suggested John around a mouthful of bread and a thick cut of ham, “it’s to taunt Bruce with footage of him being... well... sane, and cute, and happy.”

“I beg your pardon, Master John?”

“Well, he claimed Bruce wronged him, didn’t he? That implies, somehow, he thinks Bruce stole his sanity and his happiness. If that’s true, he could just be showing Bruce how he was before him to inflict him with insufferable guilt.”

“No.” Bruce shook his head doubtfully. “No, he implied that everything is supposed to link together, like a web. This is a clue to the next puzzle piece.”

“Might I suggest something, then, Master Bruce?”

“What is it, Alfred?”

“Zoom in on the windows in the footage and try find something unique that could distinguish the house from the other houses in Gotham.”

“That’s a good idea, Alfred,” Bruce allowed as John hit Alfred’s hand clumsily in a supportive high-five. He zoomed in on the windows, clearing and sharpening the image, until the reflections cast on the glass came into prominent focus. “Is that-?”

“The gates of Arkham Asylum, sir, it seems.”

John squinted. “They sure are. I’d know them in my sleep!”

“Are there any houses opposite Arkham Asylum?”

“Yes, Master Bruce, I believe there are. Most are empty, though; people can’t stand being so close to the ill.”

“This one seems to be directly opposite the asylum.”

“So, what now?” John asked, popping the last bit of his sandwich into his mouth.

“Now we go to the house. It’s obviously where he wants us to wind up.”

“I’m coming!” John announced delightedly, lunging to his feet. “Thanks for the sandwiches, Alfred!”

“You’re quite welcome, Master John.” Alfred turned to Bruce, looking disquieted. “Sir, pardon me for speaking out of turn, but are you sure taking John is such a good idea? Everyone knows John Doe, sir, as the man from Arkham Asylum. A mass murderer. A terrorist. To see Batman with him-”

“I’ll sort something out, Al.”

Alfred pursed his lips. “Very well, sir.”

Together, John and Bruce mounted the stone stairs descending into the cave, sliding past the grandfather clock into the mansion, soaking in light. “He doesn’t like me very much,” John observed. “I-I mean, I hardly blame him, really, after what I did.”

“Just give him time,” Bruce assured, but his heart wasn’t in it. If Alfred could barely muster warmth for his own son outside of blood, he wasn’t sure if he’d adjust to John.

“What are we doing, bud?”

“Finding you a costume.”

“Ooh! Finally!”

Bruce scoured the manor, digging up all sorts of scraps. He didn’t find anything purple, which dampened John’s mood; he made up an assemble of black slips and a domino mask.

“It’s only temporary.”

“I know, buddy, but this is your style, not mine! I hate feeling leeched of colour.”

“And that’s what I love about you,” Bruce said before he could think better of it. John blinked in astonishment, freezing – he’d been thumbing the outfit – so, like the cowardly man-bat he was, Bruce took that as his queue to leave.

John came out in the assemble – a black jacket, black trousers, black shoes, nothing special, but certainly something John Doe wouldn’t be caught wearing. He looked self-conscious and uncomfortable in his own skin, plucking at the fabric adorning him so strangely. “Well?”

Bruce cleared his throat, his heart in his throat. “You look great, John.”

John’s eyes twinkled. He took a step forward. “I do?” he asked softly, but paused as Bruce took a reflexive step back. He frowned. “Well,” he finished flatly, “thanks, I guess.”

Stricken, Bruce looked away. “I guess this means the name ‘Joker’ needs to be addressed again.”

John was expressionless. It was so unlike him, as was his blank voice as he murmured, “Yeah. I guess it does.”

Silence hung palpably between the pair as they travelled to the house opposite Arkham, which turned out to be a flaking white building with a brown roof attempting to pierce the blackened sky, not a house typically inhabited by ‘pompous’ rich people at all. Bruce didn’t know how to sever the silence, and he certainly didn’t think it was wanted, so he enveloped himself in a bubble of quietness and jumbled thoughts about what they could possibly find in the creature’s old family home even as they both took turns climbing into the house. He let John – Joker – go first, lifting him with his hand under his foot into the house. Scaling after him, he smelt that something was wrong first – sweet and rotten, he was plagued by the aroma of decay.

Joker was frozen in front of the windowsill, staring into the room they’d landed in, which turned out to be a living room donned by photographs and suffocating family personality. Bruce saw why he was frozen immediately: the entire place was trashed, glass littering the ground in blinking segments, the sofas ripped apart, spewing stuffing, and the pictures hanging on the walls torn down the middle, the personality stripped from the room like bone marrow from the bones. But it wasn’t that that disturbed the likes of the both of them.

It was the broken corpse of a woman, laying in her own circle of blood, a portrait of the inevitable end of mortality, sprawled awkwardly between the fireplace and the sofa, and the ‘jetting’ wall splatter next to her filling the air with its toxic rotten fumes. Her photograph was on the mantel, her arm draped around the shoulders of a young, weedy boy with pale skin and grey eyes.

 


	3. 'Til Death Do We Part

  
Batman was too surprised to even breathe, much less move, with the portrait of sickening violence flushed out in front of him like his own personalised nightmare. He’d dealt with this kind of crime scene before – corpses strewn brokenly where they’d staked their claim, with their memories in frames and the hazy ghost of their personalities bringing life to the very room where they’d been cruelly reminded of their own brittle mortality: he was inside the painting of a quaint modern household, clumsily splattered by a jet of ruby-crimson blood that kissed the air around his face with a sour, metallic smell. It induced a roiling sickness to spasm through him, up and down, over and over, until he was gulping surreptitiously for air. Joker couldn’t noticeably blanch, what with the impossible lack of colour in his face already, which was even more ice-white now with his black get-up, but his expression was clearly an etched mask of horror. Batman figured that took a lot; he thought involuntarily of the mindless violence he’d seen Joker commit in the past.

Batman, as he shattered the ice in his veins and took one tentative step closer to the woman, supposed grimly that he’d never get used to violence, not even if he spent until his own death in the suit. The blood, the glassy eyes, the rubbery-ness of fresh corpses, the discoloured, bloated skin, the broken wrongness of bodies whose lives had been beaten out of them – they were all horrific physical aspects of crime, and ones that easily took mental toll, especially when it took him back to Crime Alley twenty-two-odd years ago.

He remembered familiar glassy eyes (that had once glittered with parental love like mortal magic), bullet holes through elaborate strips of fabric, into pale skin (shearing through their life – and could he have stopped it?), and his own screams vibrating in the terrified emptiness of his own head.

But it was the mental aspects of crime that really got to him. The thought that they were a person once, with a family, lovers, places in society, and that, a certain period of time before their death, whether it be a few seconds to a few days, they had no idea that they’d never die old, like so many people expected themselves to, and that their family members had expected to hold them for many moons longer than they got to – it always managed to thicken the horror and the sickness more than broken, spilling corpses and arrayed blood splatters could morbidly hope for. Because this woman had probably had a family; people who cared about her. She’d probably had a job somewhere. If none of that, she had had self-awareness, and the capacity to have a present and a future, and that was enough.

“Don’t touch anything,” Batman finally asserted, but Joker looked like he couldn’t move to touch anything even if he wanted to. Shaking the baffling sensation that something was wrong with him, because Batman was a symbol, not a man, and conversations like that came later when the mask was off, he moved deeper into the house to consider the crime scene, leaving his paralysed partner behind him.

He looked at one of the photographs on the mantel with a crack rayed at the corner, the one where the victim’s arm was around the weedy boy from the videos. She was smiling in it, with the matching radiance beaming through her eyes; in comparison, the boy’s eyes looked bleak, although the corners of his mouth were crooked. She was probably twenty or so in the picture, definitely young for a mother, but now, her corpse looked forty to forty-five, appropriately, with the odd line marring her face, and a charming peppering of silver in her hair. He resisted the urge to pluck the broken photograph off the mantel to look intricately at her as she’d been before her death, because it would contaminate the scene, and instead moved on to lift latent prints from the immediate area busily. He stored them appropriately, with a cautiousness for no mistakes, as Joker slowly thawed and started to ghost around the room, looking lost, as he was obediently careful to keep his hands to himself.

“Blood splatters means cut arteries, right?” Joker asked, who stopped in front of the wall that was garnished by a thick, gloopy layer of congealing blood. He seemed to take it in, his expression set with focus. He giggled, but the sound was rushed and high-pitched and _wrong_ , and somehow managed to sound as stressed as a garbled whine.

“Yes,” said Batman after a moment of silence, where he intricately assessed his unreadable expression. Usually, he was good at reading people – he had to be – but trying to read Joker now was like trying to read something underwater, all blurs and estimates. “Her throat was slit. Probably with a sharp instrument.” He jerked his chin towards something near her head, something that was cluttered next to a broken vase, where water diluted blood, and blood seeped through the svelte petals of daisies and stained them pink-red artistically. A knife, sheathed with a glove of blood. “Probably with that.”

Joker looked between them, his expression inscrutable. “Oh. Have you found anything?”

“No. I’ve just been picking up latent prints.”

“The... er... The sweat between the papillary ridges of the fingertips, right?”

Batman was secretly almost... pleased. “Right.”

Joker nodded, short and thoughtful, before he cleared his throat and did a dramatic salute. “I’ll let you get on with it then, Detective Holmes.” And, with the forced humour left to drift between them heavily, he turned on his heel and stalked deeper into the house, to apparently inspect a cluster of photographs collected neatly on the kitchen table.

Batman shook his head, stricken by concern, and turned back to the scene to analyse it with his tech, and to try piece together what had happened to her. He let his feelings over Joker bleed out of him, like blood from an open wound, as he cleared his mind until it was merely a blank slate. He spent hours scoping the house, garnering evidence to take to the lab for analysis, trying to piece together the chronological order of how the woman had lost her life. He finally straightened up, and activated a hologram on his cowl, as Joker came back from the kitchen glumly and asked with careful evenness, “So, what happened here, Detective?”

“Nothing good. It seems that the offender came in through the open door.”

“What does that mean?”

“It suggests that the victim invited them in, or they had access to the home via living here through a key – which then goes on to imply a trusting relationship between them, which isn’t surprising, considering our guess is that it’s the offender's mother or their wife,” Batman told him simply. “If not, they used a spare key that they found outside.”

“Okay,” said Joker slowly. “They came in through the door, maybe with the trustful invite of the woman. Got it. How did you figure that out?”

“There’s no sign of a break-in,” Batman informed him, who’d industriously inspected all the possible entryways to find them all secure and locked, with no possibility of forced entry. “The door was open. Maybe the offender picked the lock, but... I just have a feeling.”

“Right. So they came in through the door?” Joker parroted, managing to make it sound like a question. “Then what?”

“It seems that they moved to the kitchen together before the murder happened, which suggests again that the victim and the offender were likely familiar with each other. That’s where the killer took out a knife and stabbed her at least five times. I found knife wounds studded up her back. It had been done from behind, in the most vile act of severing trust imaginable...” Batman took a second to centre himself, stealing an inaudible breath. He usually never broke his composure, but something about this whole case felt personal. “There was a struggle. Blood and hair on the floor. Hair and blood on her hands. The DNA could be from the killer, so I collected it to take it back to the cave for analysis.” He pointed so Joker could see where he was referring to when he said, “She died there.” Joker looked at the very thin strip that separated the kitchen and the living room, which was in actuality just a change of flooring, from brown carpet to white-black vinyl. “Look. The way the blood looks... She was definitely dragged from there to there, bleeding openly, which brought a smear of blood through. And the broken shards of the coffee table, and a wound to her temple, suggests that the coffee table was eventually her demise, not her stab wounds.”

Joker took a moment to respond, his face a frozen mask. “I found something in the kitchen near a piece of card that has your name on it.” He handed over two envelopes from behind his back, one of which was large and brown, the other of which looked like an average envelope. He was expressionless, although both envelopes were opened.

Tucking the brown envelope under his arm, Batman opened the white envelope first, which was devoid of anything except for his name, which had an ‘x’ scripted underneath it like a mockingly flirtatious remark. He expected to pull out a letter, but he gaped it open and saw that the writing was inside the actual envelope. Peeling tape, he unravelled it. It simply said, in elegant scrawl, _Inside her._

“What does that mean?” Joker asked, reading over his shoulder.

“I’m not sure... but I’ll figure it out.” Batman moved on to the other envelope, the brown one, which was stiff with a supporting slice of cardboard inside. He pulled out a series of thick-paper letters – documents, actually, he saw upon closer inspection. A marriage certificate, signed twenty-two years ago by Maria Jade and Jack Danish.

“What do you think it means?”

Batman felt cold and ill, although his face betrayed nothing, not even surprise. “I think that Jack Danish visited his wife earlier tonight and killed her in cold blood. And I think he’s taunting us with it.”

Joker looked confused. “So, that’s his name? Jack?”

“Maybe,” said Batman, giving Joker the envelope to hold. “It makes sense. She trusted her attacker enough to invite him into her home and take him into the kitchen to talk. And then the killer left behind the marriage certificate for us to find – it makes sense it’s the birth certificate that binds him to his wife. I’ll look into it more on the computer back at home – look where they were married, if there was a divorce, those kinds of things. I might be able to find a motive as to why he might have killed her. Maybe a divorce that led to unfair consequences, like not enough custody over a child...”

Joker pointed. “What about that?” he asked, but he looked resigned, like he already knew.

Batman lifted the white envelope again, slitting his eyes at it like he’d see new text decrypted in the paper. Of course, there was nothing, and he sighed, converting to common sense and not careful intellect. His eyes subconsciously strayed to the victim, and then he understood. Any colour that might have been in his face before leeched out, making him feel sick and hollowed. “He wants us to cut her open,” he said, his face impassive. “The clue to find the next piece of the puzzle is inside her.”

Joker looked at her. “Huh,” was all he said. And then he giggled, quick and cold. The sound was over in seconds.

Reluctantly, Batman picked his way to her and gently rolled her over onto her back, her head lolling limply on her neck as her frosty eyes flashed lifelessly at the sky. Her shirt was cut into two ribbons, and down her pudgy stomach was a long, thick line of stitches. The smell of her decay was nauseating, and her blood smelt sour and sweet and salty and metallic.

“Don’t you want me to do it?” Joker asked in surprise, already stepping forwards. It would have been easier, so much easier, for someone else to do it, Batman conceded, hesitating; but he didn’t think he’d be able to cope with seeing John Doe cut into another human being again, not without fraying parts of their relationship he hadn’t known existed. Things were too fragile right now, the trust between them existent, but also strained, like pulled violin strings.

“No. I’ll do it.” Batman knelt next to her, unsheathing a Baterang with a gentle metallic sound that sounded familiar and comforting in the silence; like patrols; like adrenaline; like The Bat. “I’m sorry,” he said to her quietly, and meant it. He dug the sharp left-hand-corner tip of the Baterang into the top of the line of stitches dotting her abdomen. It pierced her with a sickly sound. He brought it down, splitting her stomach, and her dead skin resisted to the pull, like he was cutting through rubber. The comparison made him feel clammy. Her blood was wrong – the wrong colour, the wrong texture. And the _smell_...

At first, he thought there was nothing. “Do you think he tricked us?” Joker asked into the stifling silence, both of them peering grimly into her open abdomen, which spilled starbursts of innards like a mature flower.

“No. If he said there was a clue, then there is.” And he believed that. So Batman sheathed his hands in her body, and he started to rummage around inside her, feeling for anything that didn’t feel like fat or muscle.

“So... much... _gore_.” Joker giggled quietly, wrapping his arms around himself. “Feel anything?”

With morbid triumph, Batman pulled his hands out of her, holding up a wadded-up plastic bag. It was slicked with sickly fluid.

Curiously, Joker came closer to him, peering over at the bag. His breath ghosted over the Kevlar over his neck, and Batman had the alarming vision of him breathing directly onto his neck, and he shivered privately to himself. “What’s in it?”

Batman opened it. Inside there was... a mountain of powdered red glass. “It seems to be glass,” he said blankly, incredulous. “Red glass.”

“Any idea what that means?”

“Not yet.” He stored it. “I’ll take it in for analysis.”

“Yes, sir.” Joker hesitated. “So... are we going now, buddy?” And there he was, John Doe eroding wearily through The Joker, and that’s how Batman knew the investigation was closed.

“Yes,” he said. He’d scoped the entire place, and had a suspect, and some things to follow up with in the cave. And he felt as exhausted as Joker looked. “Yes, we’re going.”

Batman contacted the GCPD to take over the scene, and prepared for leaving. And then they did, neither of them talking, as the silence enveloped them like a bitter fog of poisonous gas.   
-  
When they got back to the manor, Joker unceremoniously disappeared without a word, probably to change. Bruce didn’t follow him, thinking that he probably needed some time to himself. Instead, he got changed into a comfortable pair of brown jeans, paired with his favourite button-up, and picked his way to the kitchen, where Alfred was wiping down the counters with cleaning spray and a ragged cloth.

“Ah,” said his butler upon his arrival. “Master Wayne. You’re back. Dare I ask if you had any luck? You look terrible.”

“I found a woman dead, Alfred,” Bruce confided exhaustedly, immediately crossing to the coffee machine. He switched it on after checking it was full, and watched trickles of hot black coffee ooze into his favourite mug. “It was probably the killer’s wife. He stabbed her in the back over five times, in the comfort of her own home, after she willingly let him inside... unless he threatened his way in, but...” He shook himself free of his vulnerability, loathing himself.

Alfred stopped cleaning, going white to his collar. “That’s terrible, sir.”

“Yes,” Bruce agreed, staring distantly into his coffee. “Yes, it is.” He turned to face him, nursing his hot cup. “It’s my fault.”

Alfred frowned at him disapprovingly. “Now, whatever gave you that impression, Master Bruce?”

“He’s doing this because of me,” babbled Bruce guiltily, uncharacteristically. “He said he wants to show me how I hurt him. The people that died in the arson attacks, the woman... they’re dead because of something that I did to him. And it eats me inside, and I can’t find the person or the words to let it out.”

Alfred adjusted his glasses, looking stern. “You have no evidence to suggest that you did anything as of now, Master Bruce,” he said. “So blaming yourself and getting all worked up is foolish. If you start thinking like that, then you’ve let him win. He wants you to feel terrible. Don’t feed into his desires with distress.”

Bruce took a long sip of his coffee. It burned his mouth. He didn’t care. “You’re right,” he conceded, swallowing his distress to be replaced with a spark of resolve. “It’s just been a long day.”

“Maybe it’s time to retire?” Alfred suggested.

“I can’t. I found plenty of evidence that needs analysing immediately. He keeps killing. I don’t have any time to waste, Al.” Bruce sighed, taking another sip of coffee. Caffeine zipped in his nerves, but he was so exhausted it barely made a difference at all. “You can go to bed if you want. It’s late.”

Alfred shook his head. “Maybe it would be wise to contact Miss Kyle and ask her for her assistance in this case. She’d make a useful ally, what with her abilities.”

Bruce sighed impatiently. “Alfred, Selina and I are on bad terms,” he pointed out, taking a larger gulp of coffee to bide his time. Selina was a touchy subject; they, at this point, had a mutual disrespect for each other.

“Master Bruce, I know how you feel about each other-”

“I don’t feel anything for her,” said Bruce firmly. “She was a friend once – if that – but I have never had any romantic feelings for her.” He added sternly, “And I didn’t sleep with her that time in her apartment, no matter what Harvey said.”

Alfred blinked in surprise. “Master Bruce-”

“Sorry, Alfred.” Bruce rubbed his eyes with his hand, torrents of frustration intensifying his exhaustion. “It’s just frustrating that everyone always claims there’s a romantic bond between us – you, John, Gordon. And there isn’t.”

“I understand,” Alfred said. “My apologies, sir. I saw Master John head out into the garden,” he told him evasively. “He looked forlorn. I dare say he needs some company right now. You can join him while I analyse the evidence.”

Bruce could have hugged him. But he didn’t. He only said, “Thanks, Al.” He finished his coffee and put his cup in the sink with a clatter.

“Oh, and take this with you,” said Alfred, holding out an expensive, imported bottle of red wine.

Bruce was surprised, because this was Alfred, and Alfred liked to store the wine he bought for special occasions, not the odd drink on a glum October night. “Are you sure?”

“Well, we’ve run out of whiskey, and this is the next best thing...” Alfred’s face softened imperceptibly. “Trust me. He needs a drink right now. And so do you. So go. I’ll take over in the cave.”

“Thank you, Al.”

“Take some teacups. Dreadfully, all the wine glasses need washing.”

Bruce took the mugs and the wine outside, where John was sat on the rim of the new instated fountain, his feet in the water. As he came closer, basking in the quietness and the fresh chilly breeze of Gotham’s nighttime, John sighed, and it was true – he looked desperately forlorn. Bruce kicked off his shoes, and, without a second thought, he sat on the edge of the fountain and dug his feet in, consumed in his company. The water was cold, cold enough to shock his skin. The air was heady with the smell of tequila, and sat next to John, on the fountain, was a refilled wine glass of it.

“I brought wine,” he said awkwardly, because what else was there to say? He suddenly envied Alfred’s eloquence; Alfred, who was always composed; Alfred, who always knew what to say. He wished he knew what to say, because he ached sweetly to comfort him. The ache shocked him, honestly; he, never in a thousand years, would have thought he’d genuinely care so vehemently about John Doe, not now, not ever. He’d never experienced an ache this strongly for a person, either; not anyone outside of family, anyway. Well, except for maybe Harvey, but he’d been his best friend once; of course Bruce had cared for him. He still did, in a more distant kind of way.   
  
He supposed it had only been a matter of time before he’d let John wholeheartedly into his heart. Despite the dastardly Joker episode, John was a sweet soul. Curious. Excitable. Caring. Selfless. Sick – regretfully sick. There was something undeniably loveable about John Doe, though, something his sickness couldn’t take from him. Bruce would have been heartless to not adore his swelling, warm soul eventually.

John stopped staring miserably at his own reflection, and looked at the mugs perched on the fountain. He looked puzzled. “Are they... mugs?”

“Ah, well... yes.” Bruce stared accusingly at the mugs, wanting them to disappear. “The wine glasses were all in the sink.”

John stared at him for a long moment... and then threw his head back and laughed.

Bruce was perplexed. “What?”

“Oh, buddy!” he howled, wiping hysterical tears from his eyes. “I just can’t stay miserable around you!” He smiled at him. “Bruce Wayne, drinking wine from a mug... I never thought I’d see the day.”

Bruce peeled the metallic film off the top of the wine bottle and opened it, inhaling the sweet-bitter smell of the wine. It smelt familiar; of nights in his office, and the cave, drinking from wine glasses; of galas, and dancers whisking into each other as he drank; of his parents’ breath as they laughed during parties; and he inhaled it boldly until he could practically taste it, serving it into the mugs expertly. “Why not?” he asked, a little defensively.

“Because,” said John laughingly, “drinking wine from mugs is practised by middle-aged mothers who break out the cheap wine while their kids are in bed!” He gave a pause, his smile ebbing. “Well... they do in movies, anyway.”

Bruce shrugged, and picked up his mug. “It doesn’t matter what cup it’s in,” he rejoined to quell his embarrassment. “It still tastes good either way.”

“True that! Hey, I’ll drink to that!” John laughed, picking up his mug and knocking it against his clumsily. Wine sloshed out of it, but John didn’t seem to notice. His breath was bitter with tequila.

They both drank. The wine was lovely, and the air smelt of it, tart and warm, and the water felt warmer now that he was getting used to it. He wiggled his toes and sighed, exhausted but, for once, content. They sank into a companionable silence for a short while, enjoying their wine and the scenery: the cropped garden, carefully tamed; the groomed roses, the shaped bushes, what lay beyond the manor’s supreme gates. And then Bruce felt inclined to ask something, because, really, what friend would he be if he didn’t? A bad one, and the point of them working together was to prove he could be a good friend – if John returned it with equal dedication.

“John?”

“Yes, bud?”

“Something... earlier...” No. That was the wrong way around. Bruce thought for a long while, planning his sentence before he said it. “Earlier, in the house, something was clearly bothering you. I mean, more than... you know... seeing the woman did.”

John sighed, looking like a deflated party balloon. “Got it in one, buddy,” he said glumly. “But why are you bringing it up?”

“I just wanted to... check in, I guess?” And then he scolded himself for making it sound like a question, but John didn’t seem to blink twice. “I mean, I wanted to check in.”

John took a deep drink from his mug, smiling at him patiently. “Well,” he said softly, “thanks for doing that, buddy. I know that doing that is outside of your comfort zone.”

Bruce embraced the smile, tentatively returning it, even though it felt a little forced. He drank a bit more wine, letting the alcohol warm him on the inside, and waited for him to talk... if he talked at all.

“Well... I don’t know, buddy... It’s hard to explain.”

“Take your time, John,” Bruce encouraged quietly.

“I guess I just... I saw your face when you saw her. That moment before you covered it up, the moment you really saw her for the first time, the moment where the invulnerability disappeared. And I hated it. I hated that face in indescribable ways, buddy...” John paused, overcome, and started doing his breathing exercises.

Bruce patiently waited, finishing his mug off. He refilled it, the splash of the wine hitting the bottom of the mug sounding exaggerated in the silence, while he thought about what John had said. He didn’t have a lot of thinking time.

“I’ve killed people, too, buddy.” John grimaced. “The agents... among other people. Some of them to hurt you, just like he’s doing.” He looked down into his drink, his expression tinged by remorse. “You spoke about the killer like he was a monster. And I can’t help but think that, while you had that face, and spoke in that voice, I’d done what he had done. But you forgave me.” He shook his head. “I don’t deserve that.” He looked at him sideways. “I’m just like him.”

“You’re nothing like him.” Bruce knew there were similarities, the drive to kill people for the sake of getting to him, the gory violence – but John was different. He knew that; he believed in that. So he believed his own words as they came out his mouth. “This man, he is faulted and cruel. You’re...” He paused, uncomfortable, but John was looking at him expectantly, and he felt inclined to press on. “You’re, you know... kind. Selfless. Playful. Enlightening. Loving. John. And people like him? They don’t understand that, much less how to be that.”

John frowned. Bruce thought he looked lovely in the ribbon of moonlight, and the thought made him feel woozy and confused. Or maybe that was the wine... “I just feel like I don’t deserve to be part of this investigation as your sidekick,” he sighed.

“You said you wanted to help me. Have you changed your mind?”

“No, not at all!” John held up his hands. “Geez, buddy, who do you think I am? Working with Batman, it’s been an honour!”

“But...?”

“But... But me and him, we _are_ similar, Bruce. _Were_ similar, anyway. So helping Batman take him down... well, it isn’t an honour I’m worthy of. Because I’ve killed people like her before. I did it to see that face you pulled. And, once, I took pleasure in it. Real, sick pleasure.”

“John, I... need help for this.” Bruce looked away, flushing. He felt too exposed, cracked open like a dismembered clam, spilling his blackened pearls. And he hated it, and part of him wanted desperately to subtract himself from the conversation, but, somehow, at the same time, it felt... like being free. Like spilling this, his feelings, it was puncturing him and spilling out the weight inside of him to make him feel weightless. “More help than I’d care to admit.” He looked at him now. “And I want you to help.”

“Really?” John’s eyes were wet and dubious.

“Batman couldn’t ask for a better sidekick.”

John looked away, but his lips were crooked, and his eyes were still misty. “Ah, well, shucks... thanks. Hey, buddy?”

“Yeah, John?”

“Have you ever wished into a fountain?” John gently disturbed the water with his feet, leaning over to look into it at their distorted reflections.

“Once,” Bruce recollected, moved by the memory. “I was five, and it was Christmas. The lights were strung around the square, and people were singing. The air was light and fluffy with snow. I wished for my family to be happy forever.” His eyes stung. He willed away the urge to cry; it worked. He was used to it, battling back tears. The air was so cold the tears would have frozen on his cheeks. “But wishes don’t come true.”

“Well, maybe you just got a bad fountain. This fountain might work!” John dug two quarters out of his pocket. “Here. Make a wish.”

“John-”

“Ah, ah, ah! Less talking, more wishing! Humour me, buddy.”

Feeling foolish, Bruce closed his hand around his quarter, hard enough it engraved marks into his skin, and closed his eyes. He tried to think of a wish to humour him, but nothing came. Maybe he wished for nothing, because he had everything that could possibly be given to him. Or maybe his brain was just too fried. Either way, he waited until he heard John throw his coin into the fountain before he followed suit. The ripples warped the clear water, water that looked black in the silky darkness.

“What did you wish for?”

“For all of this to work out,” Bruce lied, looking at their reflections. They looked like a visually appealing couple, one a starburst of colour, the other a drab blanch of it, both attractive and tall. John smiled at their reflections, and Bruce wondered if the same thought had occurred to them both. “What about you? What did you wish for?”

John looked at him, and his lips quivered. For a while... silence. Well, silence except for their breathing, anyway, which curled misty-white in the air between their faces. Then, he pursed his lips to quell the shaking and tipped up his chin, his face morphing into absolute resolve. “I wished that you would kiss me.”

Bruce felt the shock like a slap to the face. He wondered if he’d misheard, but, apparently, he hadn’t. The floor heaved, and the world disappeared around them, with nothing else in his universe except for John and his own breath, erratically coiling in the air: John, who stared back at him waveringly, with the same searching, hopeful look that he’d given him before Bruce had told him that he didn’t trust him; the same nervous mistiness to his eyes that he’d sported at the funeral when he’d given him a bizarre condolence card.

He leaned forwards without the intention to do so, drawn to his mouth, to him, to everything about him, every perfect and imperfect aspect of him – hopelessly, inevitably drawn to the strange existence of John Doe. Their noses brushed, which were cold at the tips, and the real contact, the anticipation, felt like live electricity across the sprawling expanse of his skin. He moved forwards slowly, tentatively, experimentally, and their mouths nearly brushed-

“Master Bruce,” said a voice from the manor doorway.

His heart pounding unevenly in his chest, Bruce jerked away, the warmness in his gut recoiling into frost. Alfred was stood there, looking proper and composed, as though he hadn’t just walked in – well, out – on them both nearly kissing. “Alfred,” he mustered breathlessly. John scooted away from Bruce on the fountain, looking flustered without the blush to match. “What is it?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’ve looked some significant samples of evidence over, and I think it would be wise for you to come down to the cave.”

“Thanks, Alfred. Give us a moment.”

“Sir.” Alfred disappeared reverently.

“I get it,” said John, looking resigned and... angry.

“Get what?” Bruce managed, feeling drunk. Confused.

“I’m a criminal. I’m a man. You don’t feel that way about me. The nearly-kiss was a mistake. It won’t happen again. _Blah, blah, blah_.”

“Is that what you want?”

John stood up. “Well, Bruce,” he continued, undeterred, like he hadn’t heard him at all, “you don’t have to waste your breath on me. I get it.”

“Get what? John-”

“No. Forget you.” And, with that, John stomped inside, leaving his wine and his tequila behind.

For Alfred’s sake, Bruce took the dishes into the kitchen before he made his way to the cave. John was already there, slouching, looking upset and far away. Alfred was hovering by the computer, looking formally at him upon his arrival.

“What have you found?”

“The hair and the blood that you found on the victim weren’t hers, but, unfortunately, I can’t match it to anyone on the system.”

“Dammit.” Disappointed, Bruce sank into his chair, sighing. Stress had his muscles permanently lock. John was studiously not looking in his direction. “All right. What else did you find, Al?”

“Not a lot, really,” Alfred admitted regretfully, “crime scene wise. The killer was thorough. But I found something interesting that involves the glass that John said you retrieved from her corpse.”

“What?” Bruce leaned closer, intrigued.

“The glass is very old,” Alfred said. “Rare.”

“Were you able to narrow it down and find out where it originates?” Bruce asked hopefully.

“I looked into Maria and Jack, sir. Whether they are still together – were, sorry – is a mystery, but legally they’re still man and wife. They wed in a Church here in Gotham that is sat on the border of the city some years ago. It was bombed a few days ago in a supposed terror attack. Five people were killed, a dozen injured. I looked up newspaper clippings, and it looks like the Church had red on their windows...” Alfred shot his cuffs. “Of course, we won’t know for certain if it’s the same window unless samples are compared, but I think the coincidences call for an investigation.”

“I agree, Alfred.”

“But, first, you and Master John both need sleep. You won’t help anyone by stumbling around like the walking dead, least of all yourself.”   
  
Bruce thought about that for a moment... and then grudgingly nodded. “I’ll investigate tomorrow as soon as the sun goes down,” he allowed. “You need sleep, too, Alfred.”

“I’ll retire for the night, sir.”

“Good.”

John left immediately, while Bruce lingered, because Alfred gave him an expectant look. He felt distinctly nervous, like he had as a child when he knew he was about to be berated for a wrongdoing.

“Master Bruce, it isn’t because he’s a man,” Alfred ventured, his expression inscrutable. “Frankly, I wouldn’t care if you found happiness with an alien squid. But John Doe is a criminal. He’s a madman that has murdered thousands of people. And you should do well to remember it.”

“I remember it, Alfred,” Bruce said tightly, defensively. “And it was a mistake.” He heard John’s voice caressing the back of his mind, and he grimaced. “Spur of the moment thing. He was drunk, and I...”

“What was your excuse?” Alfred prompted; then, he softened. “I just want you to be careful, Master Bruce. After all this time, I don’t want you to give your heart to someone with the supreme ability to break it.”

Bruce squeezed his shoulder. “I know, Al. Don’t worry about me.”

“I always do.”

They parted ways to their bedrooms. Bruce brushed his teeth in his small bathroom, stripped to his boxers, and climbed into bed. He thought that his mind was racing too much to sleep, but he was wrong. Almost immediately, he was asleep, drifting dreamlessly where there was no hurt or confusion.   
-  
In the morning, John was already dressed and eating breakfast in the kitchen, drinking sweet coffee hot. Bruce came in, feeling groggy and drugged, and was directed to a plate of hot eggs. He scarfed them down without tasting them, or even feeling them, burning his tongue. Alfred wasn’t around, only John, so Bruce presumed that John had made the eggs, and suddenly he was glad that he couldn’t taste or feel anything.

“You’re in a hurry,” John observed over his coffee. “Going somewhere?”

“Work.” Bruce drained his coffee, shrugging on his coat. “I have some legal paperwork to fill out so I can get the company up and running again, and some people are coming in to do some more repairs.”

John got to his feet. “I’m coming with you,” he proclaimed decisively, without room, really, for an argument.

Bruce stopped. “What? Why?”

“It’s my chance to try... you know... help you out. I’m the one who did the damage. Well. One of the people.” John shrugged, but his expression was pleading. “Please, buddy? I’ll be on my best behaviour and everything!”

“Okay. But you have to promise not to distract me, John. Do you understand me?”

“Hey, I pinkie-swear.”

As it turns out, surprisingly, John didn’t always stay true to his pinkie-swears. It felt like an eternity after they arrived at Wayne Enterprises that Bruce realised, not for the first time, that John really hated silences. If he wasn’t plunging into lengthy conversations and debates, he was making ridiculous sounds and playing with everything in Bruce’s sprawling office, which on-looked the city.

“Say, buddy? What’s this?” John plucked a random book off his bookcase and wielded it.

“Read it,” said Bruce without looking up. “Then you’ll know.”

“Are you nearly done yet?”

“No.”

“Oh... How about now?”

“No.”

“I’m hungry.”

“You know where the shops are.”

John pouted at him, then hopped onto his desk and sat on it cross-legged, staring critically down at the paperwork he was working on. “You still think I could work here one day?”

“Why not?” Bruce said distractedly. “If you work for it. Nothing is for free.”

“You got this company for free,” John pointed out, which was technically true, not that the remark was appreciated. Bruce raised an eyebrow at him.

“Yes,” Bruce agreed slowly. “But hard work is why I still have it. Or... had it. And hard work is why I’m getting it back again.”

John looked thoughtful. “I’ve never thought of it like that.” He beamed. “Thanks for enlightening me, bud.” He slid off the desk, suddenly holding up a globe. Bruce wondered where he’d gotten it from, surprised. “We’re here.” He pointed randomly at a green section on the globe.

Bruce sighed. “If we were in Africa, I’d feel overdressed. John, you’re distracting me.”

John winced. “Sorry.” But he didn’t sound very sorry. He scoped the bookcases with barely veiled wonder. “How do you do it? Be this and Batman at the same time?”

“Passion,” said Bruce instantly, giving up with his paperwork. “Determination.”

“Yes, but... why?”

“What?”

“What drives you?” John turned towards him dramatically and struck a pose. “What makes the handsome, mysterious Bruce Wayne... er... tick?”

“This was my parents’ company before they passed away. Working here, it’s in my blood. I want to continue to run it so that a part of them will always be here.” Bruce frowned, watching John pretend to write this down on an imaginary notepad like a reporter. “Sometimes it’s hard work, but it’s necessary. This is where I’m meant to be.” He picked up his pen again, tapping it against the desk. “And the businessman persona doesn’t hurt. Or the money. The money pays for Batman. Batman saves people and puts scumbags like Joe Chill in prison.”

“Good reason.” John unstuck himself from the pose. “The sun is going down.”

Bruce looked out the window. “Huh,” he said. “We were here longer than I thought.”

“Sometimes that happens to me. Except usually I’m at Arkham, and I’m so drugged that my memories of the day are scattered all over the place.”

“I...” Bruce didn’t even know how to respond to that. Instead of doing just that, he whisked to the workers inside the dead building to say his courteous goodbyes, and left them to work on the destruction of the Enterprises as he signed out.

The street smelled like vendor food and rain, and the air was sweet with music. There was a man playing a guitar on the street lining nearby, his head bent over the instrument lovingly. Bruce left him a splash of dollars, and hunched his shoulders against the snappy wind, keeping his arm touching John’s so he’d know if he slipped behind.

“Look! Bruce, look!”

Alarmed, Bruce looked... and relaxed. John was wildly pointing at an ice cream vendor. “What?”

“Could I maybe, just maybe, have an ice cream, please? Oh, please, buddy! I haven’t had one in... Well, ever, actually.”

Bruce took it as a serious sense of duty to buy him an ice cream after that, because he’d never heard of someone who hadn’t tried ice cream before. With the pink, fluffy strawberry treat in hand, John then resumed to follow him down the street at a brisk pace, knocking his shoulder against Bruce’s arm in comfortable companionship.

“Thanks for letting me come with you today, Bruce,” John said, and suddenly Bruce didn’t mind that much that John had distracted him the entire day, because it suddenly didn’t seem very important anymore. He minded more that John was biting his ice cream, not licking it, because it was stranger than him never trying it had been. “I really appreciate it.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“It was a welcome distraction.” John bit off the last bit of his ice cream and moved on to the cone. The outline of his mouth was pink. “The tension... Eesh! It’s even making _me_ feel uncomfortable!”

“Soon, he’ll be behind bars.” Bruce wasn’t sure if he was telling him or telling himself. “And then everything will be okay... until the next big criminal comes along.”

John beamed. “All in the job description, buddy!” he said cheerfully. “This ice cream is amazing!” He nudged his arm with his. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Bruce hesitated. “You have some on your...” He made a vague gesture at his face.

John frowned, stopped walking, and patted his face with a faint expression of alarm. Bruce stopped, too, and noticed that people were angrily buzzing to themselves as they pushed around them, so he reached out himself and used his thumb to clear the creamy mess from his skin. John stopped, his face a frozen mask. Bruce wondered if he’d overstepped. “Thanks.” He sounded weak. “But now you have ice cream on your thumb and nowhere to wipe it.”

Bruce looked appraisingly at his thumb, until John casually took it into his mouth and sucked the ice cream off, then started bounding into the crowd. Flustered and confused, Bruce followed.

“It was strange, being in those hallowed walls again,” said John thoughtfully. He was grimacing, his ice cream cone forgotten in his hand. “I do feel genuine remorse for what I did, Bruce.”

“I know.”

“I’m not... completely heartless.”

“I know.”

“I see how much this is affecting you, and I feel worse. I should have stopped Harley. I want to make this right, buddy.”

“Thank you.”

There was nothing else to say as darkness dipped over Gotham, casting her into a haze of shadows and lemony streetlight. Less people prowled the streets, less witnesses to see them use the shadows clumped in an alley to gear up. Batman turned to face Joker, and remembered that he’d need to clear his schedule eventually so he could arrange to get some material for a new get-up.

“Ready?” he asked, although he turned away before he got an answer.

“Yes, boss!”

In the Bat Mobile, the trip to the Church was a very short one. Joker was excited the entire ride, eagerly pawing the car’s dashboard, staring eagerly at the buttons – but never touching, knowing not to touch. When they got out, he throbbed contagious energy.   
  
“You can tell that this place went out with a bang!” Joker clasped his hands together eagerly, looking at the Church in starry-eyed amazement. This was true by half; some of the Church was demolished, but the upper half, with the alter, the lumbering window, they stood untouched, as though immortal. “Look at all the destruction.” He giggled, clapping slowly. “So much leftover toxic energy...”

Batman decidedly ignored him and stepped into the Church. Some of the chairs were dust; others were intact, and lined the remaining span of the Church like they were waiting patiently for more company. On the alter stood a camera on a tripod, and Batman wondered if he was being filmed. But the camera was off, and he suddenly realised that it had been left for him. So he hesitantly sauntered to it.

“A camera?” Joker sounded as confused as Batman felt.

“I think he wants us to watch another video.” Batman pressed the on button, and it immediately blinked onto a paused video. The thumbnail implied the footage was old, and it was in extremely poor condition. He pressed play, trying not to get irritated that Joker was breathing down his neck.

On the footage, there was a man waiting at the alter, with the camera positioned at least in the middle of the Church, if not further back, pointing at him as he laughed with his Best Man. He looked cheerful and young, with a halo of blond hair and sculpted eyebrows curved over his electric blue eyes. The smile that he turned on his fiancée as she walked down the aisle was simply breathtaking.

The camera was too old and too far away from the couple to catch their vows, but they looked happy. In love. Clasping hands, staring into each other’s eyes. Their kiss was a thing from fairy tales. He dipped her and kissed her over and over again, like he couldn’t get enough, always holding her closer. When they straightened, she looked flushed and happy. Hand-in-hand, they came down the aisle together, smiling joyfully at their families. When she got close enough, he realised she was the victim, and his stomach sank.

“It’s her.” Joker looked thunderstruck. “Which makes that man our killer. They look so in love...”

“And yet that love ended in toxic, fatal violence,” Batman said. “Why?” He didn’t expect an answer, and he didn’t get one. They replayed the footage, again and again, looking to garner evidence, but there was nothing. “He always leaves clues. If it isn’t on the footage, it has to be here. Somewhere.”

It took ten minutes to properly investigate the entire establishment. In that time, Joker straightened and triumphantly waved two slips of paper. “Hey, partner, I think I found something!”

“What?”

“Ballroom tickets!”

Batman stared – confused.

“It was under these rings at the alter.” Joker held up a pair of rings. One of them was splattered by dried blood. “Which means he wants us to go to the ball in Gotham Hall tomorrow night.”

“Jack will be there,” Batman guessed instinctively. “I’m sure of it. But why would he want us to go to a social event he’s going to when he knows we’re openly investigating him?”

“I don’t know, partner. But I do know something.”

“What?”

“It’s time to go _shopping_!”

Maybe there were worse things than homicidal shapeshifters after all.

 

 


	4. Apology Desserts of the World

  
“Hold on, John. Slow down. Why do we need to do this again?”

On the night of the revelations unravelled in Church, John stopped walking and turned to smile at him flippantly. Wearing what he was wearing, Bruce thought he looked like some kind of ridiculous heroin on a stealth mission in a low budget action movie, or a drug-dealer that had tried too hard to be surreptitious before taking to the cover of darkness: a camouflaged black jacket with the hood pulled up tight to throw his face and hair into shadows, and some snug dark jeans pasted to his thighs that flexed mesmerizingly when they walked.

But they weren’t walking. They were a few paces from a flashy nightclub in The Narrows, where a bouncer with a smashed nose, a tangle of dark facial hair and an incomplete spine of teeth flashing in a browbeating sneer guarded the door, skimming them occasionally with eyes as flat and cold as thick gobs of ice, analysing them for any signs of trouble.

“We’ve been over this, buddy,” John said, not exactly unpleasantly. He was too busy enjoying the high of being ‘stealthy’ and ‘undercover’ for that; the delight throbbed coyly from his skin, and he had his hands clasped in front of his face with a slight bend of his back in a way that always alluded to the fact he was excited.

Bruce sighed behind his hood, burying his numb fingers in his jacket for some degree of warmth, trying to thaw some blood back into them. He didn’t exactly know why he’d agreed to this (John’s puppy dog eyes). Or why he was still here (the need to see John happy again).

Frankly, he wanted to go home. To get in bed, or to suit up so he could burn off some agitated energy, he wasn’t sure, but both of those options sounded good, or at least better than _this_.

He couldn’t believe he was here instead, in the dodgiest part of Gotham City, waiting to be mugged – or worse. Batman, he could stop crime in a quick match of ruthless fists, but Bruce? He couldn’t, necessarily. Not without deriving suspicion. Not without his gadgets. He felt like a walking target – everyone was an offender, and every gesture was offensive. He realised with an unhappy jolt that this was how most people felt every day.

“Yes, you did,” Bruce admitted, his voice interlaced with its own exasperation. “But I just can’t understand why we’re going _here_ of all places to get outfits for the ball, when there’s a perfectly good costume shop twenty minutes away.”

John almost rolled his eyes into his head. “I know someone who owes me a favour. He’ll help us out.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Something happened between us back in my Joker days,” he explained, and blinked when the comment earned him a stern frown. “Oh! No, don’t worry, Bruce! There’s nothing dodgy about him. He’s just a regular guy. I think.”

“Right,” Bruce said sceptically. “What has your friend got to do with our outfits, anyway?”

“He’s a seamstress! Obviously.” John bumped his arm with his elbow playfully. “Plus, this way we can customise our outfits exactly the way we want them. Which means _matching_ _outfits_!”

Oh no.

“There’s more important things to do than this,” Bruce said quickly, veiling a grimace. “Like investigating Jack so we’re ready before the ball.”

Earnestly, John said, “Nothing is more important than fashion.”

“I can think of a million things that are more important than fashion,” Bruce muttered inconspicuously, but John heard him – of course he did – and his chest swelled in a dramatic sigh that curled, white and wispery, in the exaggerated coldness of Gotham’s late autumn.

“Okay,” John conceded, “so uncovering information on Jack is... a little important. _But_ there’s nothing that says we can’t look the part.”

“And what ‘part’ is that?”

“Duh, swanky spies! Or... Or Sherlock Holmes and Watson! You’re Sherlock Holmes – the crime-solving Daddy of this great undercover operation – and I’m Watson, the well-dressed sidekick!”

Bruce tried to comb his head for an appropriate answer, but he faltered and came short. To mask his ineloquence, he averted the conversation. “And you think this man will do this favour for you?”

“I know he will.”

Bruce looked at him suspiciously from a sideways angle. “How can you be so sure?”

“Well, because I took it upon myself to try save his daughter, of course,” John said, with a radiant brightness in his voice that didn’t exactly fit the mood. “She worked in one of the buildings that Harley poisoned. A nurse. Very professional, very respected in her field. She gave me a medical check-up in Arkham when I got in a fight with someone who was using his straw as a whistle. I liked her. So I gave her a tip to have a... well-deserved early lunch.”

Bruce conceded that was a pretty good reason to assume his helpfulness, if he was a grateful man, and allowed himself a secret tinder of hope. “And she did?” he guessed, needing to fill the silence.

“No. She didn’t. But the effort still counted.” John giggled, but he quickly caught Bruce’s expression – a cocked dark eyebrow, and pursed plump lips. He swallowed his giggle, and conceded, “Well, maybe not so much to him.”

“Great,” Bruce sighed, feeling like a deflated party balloon. “Now we’re back to square one.”

John looked alarmed. “No, don’t give up yet, buddy! He _will_ help us!” He tugged on Bruce’s sleeve desperately as he made to turn away in defeat. “Just... trust me. Please.”

Bruce couldn’t say no. Because even the implication of breaching the topic of trust was like treading on egg shells these days. He was always waiting to say the wrong thing, for him to go off, always waiting for the cycle to loop... “All right. Fine,” he said, and looked sideways at his taken aback expression. “I’ll go with you to meet him.”

The lines of tension cresting John’s shoulders abruptly relaxed. “Really? Gee. Thanks, bud.”

Bruce hunted for something to say. “Any advice on how to make him like me?”

“Er... Well... he likes... um... cats! Maybe... bond with him over cats?”

“But I hate cats.”

“Is that a bat thing?”

“No. It’s a ‘cat’s are evil bastards’ thing.” Bruce was vexed – because he was tired, and hungry, and it all amounted into a serious degree of crankiness. “How are we even getting into the club?”

“This ‘friend’ of mine owns it, so I know a way in. He makes the password the last city he visited – he travels a lot with his family.”

“Which is...?” Bruce prompted, although he didn’t expect him to actually know. So it came as a subtle shock when John actually responded.

“Tokyo.”

“Fine.” Bruce blinked. “Anything else I need to know?”

“No.”

“In that case... let’s get this over with.”

The bouncer sized them up as they approached the door, his eyes glazed with frozen suspicion. “Password?”

“Tokyo.”

The bouncer shuffled aside, albeit reluctantly, and John shot him an exasperating look of smug triumph as they wiggled into the club.

It was a pulsing span of multicoloured lights and writhing bodies clammy with sweat tangling together in dance to the music, which thrummed through his toes like a disembodied heart. There were tables littering the edges of the room, and a bar at the end highlighted with a pearly kind of coloured light, where a young bartender milled behind the counter serving drinks. Next to the bar was a curly staircase twisting to a balcony, where there was a door leading somewhere, somewhere secluded and guarded and private.

“I’m going to go find him, buddy!” John yelled over the music. “You split off from the group”-Bruce rolled his eyes-“and get him a rum and Coke to butter him up! It’s fools proof!”

Silently, Bruce squeezed between the compact bodies grinding to the song until he was seated at the bar, where the bartender turned to him with a flattering smile, hooking a towel over his shoulder. “A rum and a Coke, please,” he ordered, and turned to watch John disappear into the crowd to find a man who’d lost his daughter to Joker’s girlfriend’s cruel antics. “And two beers,” he added as an afterthought, throwing him a pool of cash. He scooped up the sweating bottles and glass gratefully, and quickly found John pushing through the crowd, who was approaching a stern-soft-looking man with a fluff of blond hair, who was sulking into space.

He reached him before him, and Bruce couldn’t hear what was transpiring between them, but the man suddenly looked very unhappy. His mouth formed words shot in quick succession.

The man, breaking off from a string of vile words, looked annoyed and petulant when Bruce gingerly put his drink in front of him. “Is this your way of softening me up, Clown?” he growled. He had an accent, something rich and elegant and ancient. Very pleasant.

“That depends,” John seduced, leaning his hip on the table. He was attractive when he smiled like that, Bruce thought with a pang in his chest. “Is it working?”

“No.”

“Then no, Daniel. How could you even suggest such a thing?” John cheerfully plopped himself opposite him with a giggle. “We need to talk.”

‘Daniel’ sniffed. “You called me here urgently, with a _time limit_ and a _threat_ , and had the further audacity to be late. And now you want to _talk_?” He rimmed his glass with his finger, his half-moon mouth, outlined by a couple of days' worth of stubble, pursed thinly. “Listen, Clown-”

“Well, you showed up, didn’t you? It would be a waste of both of our times if you just left again.”

Anger spasmed in Daniel’s eyes, just an uncontrolled slither of nimble movement, before it was gone. “I only came because you _threatened to have me arrested_!”

Bruce turned to look at John in shocked disapproval. “John, is that true?”

John shrugged, not exactly dismissively. “He wouldn’t have come otherwise,” he said. “And I know enough about his criminal track to have him arrested for years. Life, maybe.”

“If you want to talk, then talk,” Daniel spat. “Some of us have spouses and kids.”

Bruce pushed down his conflict, and thought, a little wryly, _All of this for a pair of outfits_.

John explained about the favour, even when Daniel’s face started to twist and purple in disgusted anger, and he spat on the floor by his feet in open distaste. John shot Bruce a look, but Bruce couldn’t exactly blame Daniel for his reaction, despite himself. He didn’t know how he’d react if the ex-boyfriend of his daughter’s killer asked him for a favour. Especially a bizarre one that required talent and physical work.

Strike out, maybe. But Daniel was chewing aggressively on a toothpick, and his fists were wedged between his legs. Not a single punch had been thrown. Yet.

“Who said I would be able to make the outfits in time, anyway?”

“You made two dresses from scratch on the day of your twin daughters’ birthday last year. I know you can.” John’s voice was even, not unkind. “Please? Pleaaassseee? With a please on top?”

“With a cherry on top,” Daniel corrected automatically.

“What?”

“You said ‘with a please on top’. But it’s...” Daniel seemed to realise they were staring at him strangely, because he trailed off for a lost second. “After Annabella, you have some real cheek asking for favours.”

“Please,” said Bruce, intervening with slippery skill. Daniel looked at him in surprise, his fists relaxing a little. “I know he doesn’t deserve it, but we need those outfits for tomorrow night. I’ll even pay you generously for them. A thousand dollars in cash, five hundred per outfit. Does that sound generous enough to you?”

Daniel looked at him like he’d never seen him before. “Bruce Wayne,” he said critically, appraising him. “I didn’t take you as the type to hang around with the wrong sort, judging by your social status. Charitable bachelor, isn’t it?”

“John has turned over a new leaf, Daniel. And even if he hadn’t – which he has – the outfits are for a costumed ball party tomorrow night. They’re nothing with a complicated, incriminating backstory.” Bruce’s voice was a little desperate now, because John was starting to look despondent, and without those outfits, they wouldn’t be able to take even a step inside that ball. “A thousand dollars per outfit,” he amended, and dug out his wallet to give him the cash upfront. “Just... please.” His pride was tattered in shredded, pungent chunks as he waited... and waited...

And then, “Fine. I’ll make your silly costume-ball outfits for you. But make it four thousand.”

“Done.” They shook hands, which was, shockingly enough, initiated by Daniel.

John _whooped_ and readily jammed a piece of paper into Daniel’s hand, who, upon prompt, shielded the drawing scrawled on it from Bruce’s curious eyes, taking it in with a puckered expression of vast concentration that gave nothing away.

“These will take a few hours to do. The intricacy on them will be a little tricky.” Daniel looked up at them, like he’d somehow forgotten they were there. “But I trust that you can make yourselves otherwise preoccupied?” He looked at them unpleasantly from the underneath of his thick, bristly eyelashes. The remark roughly translated to ‘piss off’. And Bruce was happy to oblige: the tension in the air was thick enough to squeeze.

“I saw an all-you-can-eat, multi-cultural dessert buffet a few streets over when we came here,” Bruce said quickly, appealing to John’s sweet tooth. “Do you want to check it out, John?” And although he made it a question, he was already dragging him through the crowd to the exit.

He wasn’t lying. There _was_ an all-you-can-eat buffet at a colourful restaurant a few streets over, where the inside of the charmingly quaint building, which was a gentle pallete of marble-whites and pastel-pinks, smelt soft with chocolate and herbs and dairy. On the wall opposite the counter was a series of clocks, each one different to each other – underneath them were the names of different countries, and the times were all different. He guessed it was the time in different parts of the world.

The restaurant was relatively empty, so the thin stream of chatter was thankfully quiet, and helped to not intensify his head pains. The mood was soft and tranquil, everything his night hadn’t been, when they accepted a pair of paper plates from a waiter after paying upfront. They piled their plates high with a spread variation of appealing desserts, and then took a seat near the back of the restaurant, where the crowd was thinnest.

“I don’t know what this is,” John enthused, spooning his pink Angel Delight, “but it looks so cute.” He grinned in tangible anticipation. “Cheers,” he said, and clinked their spoons together.

They simultaneously tried the coloured, creamy mousse, savouring the flavour together. The sweet taste of strawberries burst over his tongue as the dessert melted over it divinely, rolling a moan up his throat. “Mmm.”

John looked at him over his spoon, paused, and then said, very slowly, very quietly, “Carry on like that, Bruce, and you might make me jealous”, like a sensual, deliberate warning. Bruce sucked in a startled breath – and inhaled half his Angel Delight down his windpipe.

When the wretched choking was finally over, Bruce pompously dabbed water from his bloated cheeks with a handkerchief, masking his humiliation by trying to veil the hideous red splotches blotching his cheekbones.

John looked mystified. “Is that how you’re supposed to act when someone says something lewd to you?” he asked no one in particular. “I must have missed it in the ‘How To Seduce The Man Who Has Everything’ pamphlet I picked up from Cat Lady last weekend.”

Bruce knew he was trying to jest, but he moved to his next dessert to avoid answering. It was some kind of cake thing, a distorted ball that was covered in chocolate. When he spooned one in his mouth, cream exploded on his tongue. He clamped down a moan this time, focusing on chewing. It felt exaggerated. “Good?” he asked John courteously, who was digging in to a milky rice pudding.

“Mm-hm!” John swallowed his mouthful. “Say, buddy, I didn’t take you as someone who indulges in desserts.”

“I’m not,” Bruce said, and, not sure why, he added earnestly, “I’m kind of a health freak.”

John didn’t look surprised, but real curiosity glittered in his florescent eyes as he picked the jam off his rice pudding and licked it off his spoon. “Really?” he prompted. “Which means...?”

Bruce shovelled another one of the cream-stuffed things into his mouth, and considered not answering. But John’s eyes softened, like he could read his uncertainty, and he relented. “Which means I have to work out a set amount of times a day. And eat within a certain amount of calories. And eat a specific category of food. And not eat another category.”

John looked intrigued. “Why?”

“I had some issues with eating growing up. It was the only thing I could control. Eating, that is. I guess it carried over.” Uncomfortably, Bruce kept his mouth occupied with chocolate and pastries and cream.

“This is nice,” John said suddenly.

“The Victoria Sponge?”

“Talking to Bruce. My best buddy. The man behind The Bat.” John spread his ghostly hands, like he was drawing the rainbow with his palms, and beamed. “I don’t see Bruce a lot anymore.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said into his bowl. “Me, neither.”

“But I want to,” John added, rocking in his chair. “And I want...” He trailed off with a frown, and Bruce remembered the fountain with a forewarning flash.

“Not here,” he said quickly, which wasn’t exactly _no_ , he realised belatedly... but it was too late, because John was already vibrating in his chair like he might shake apart. “Not now.”

John simpered. “I can wait.”

Bruce’s knees were sure to have buckled if he was still standing up.

They spent an hour tasting desserts, American and otherwise, until they were both full and a little sick, and the waiters were pestering about closing up. Although The Narrows was the home of skulking shadows, Bruce felt inexplicably safe as he walked close enough to John to touch, not completely sure where they were going.

So he asked. “Er, John... Where are we going?”

“To a bookstore.”

Okay. That wasn’t what he’d expected. “Okay... Why?”

John’s eyes were soft and miserable as he looked down at his knotted fingers. He moved easily enough around the few people walking around at this hour, so Bruce didn’t say anything. “Well... the desserts inspired me, buddy!”

“That’s good, John,” Bruce enthused absently, sliding his hands into his pockets. “But... why?”

“I’ve been thinking about a present to give to someone. Something that’s sweet, inexpensive, and fun. I wasn’t sure, until I saw you eating those desserts, buddy. You looked so blissed out! Like you aren’t the type of person that has studied every article about the dangers of sugar consumption and eats ten of his five-a-day.”

“Hey. Watch it.”

John smiled, a lovely smile with no teeth that looked tender and innocent. “Desserts make people happy-”

“Okay, you’re reading way too far into desserts, John. Are you tired?”

John shook his head absently. “I was allowed to bake in Arkham, until that intolerable douchebag Sam stabbed someone with a spoon. I really enjoyed it. It was finally a hobby that I could throw myself into. So... I’m going to bake Alfred something.”

“ _What?_ ”

“I’m going to get a cookbook and bake Alfred something. An apology cake with icing that says ‘I’m sorry’ on it, or some cookies.” John caught the ‘why?’ bubbling on his lips. “Because I hate that he hates me, buddy. Because he’s been like a father to you, you told me that, and for someone with such a hands-on part of your upbringing to hate me...” He shook his head. “So, I want to start making amends.”

“I don’t think baking will help, John... After what you did...”

Hurt and panic spasmed in John’s eyes, but he balled his hands up in determination. “No! I’ll do everything I can. Besides, everyone likes chocolate cake, right?”

“Actually, I hate chocolate cake.”

John gasped and mimed clutching his ‘stopping’ heart. “Ouch... Right... in the feelings...”

Bruce managed a smile.

The bookstore was easy enough to find, and surprisingly still open, bathing cheap yellow light onto the wedge of pavement outside the door whenever a late shopper piled onto the street. John ducked into the shop eagerly, and hunted for the cooking section instantly like a predator sniffing out prey, until he came to an entire shelf of cooking books. He clapped his hands together in delight, and got to work.

Heaving a sigh, Bruce helped him rifle through the infinite number of cooking books until he triumphantly brandished a baking book.

“A-ha! One step closer to achieving sugary Heaven, bud!” He held up his hand, and Bruce gave it an awkward smack. “All right!”

“Now what?”

“Duh. Now we head back to the mansion to make the best dessert Alfred has ever tasted in his life!” 

***

  
The chocolate cake wasn’t coming through exactly like John had expected. When he’d entered the kitchen for the first time, Bruce had watched him throb energy, and grab the proper equipment with all the enthusiasm of a young child... but what was in the mixing bowl was currently a mass of bubbly slop, nothing resembling cake batter at all, and Bruce wished he could say he knew what had gone wrong, but he couldn’t.

“What did I do wrong?” John asked despondently, rhythmically knocking his forehead against the fridge. “Ugh! This is never going to work!”

“I don’t bake,” Bruce admitted, confused and overwhelmed with the entire process, “but I think we added too much milk. And not enough eggs.”

“Oh, well, that’s useless! We can add an egg, but how are we supposed to take out the milk when it’s already been stirred?” John delivered a last blow to his head, then stumbled back and cradled the spot with a profanity that was snarled and bitter on his lips. “Dammit!” He kicked the fridge. It rattled and cracked open, teetering on spilling its contents.

“John, calm down! It doesn’t matter if we added too much milk. We just need to figure out how much more of everything we need to even it back out.”

“You’re right.” John tried to do his breathing exercises, clenching and unclenching his fists, but abruptly, he exclaimed, “You make it sound so _easy_!” He slung himself onto the floor in defeat, sitting with his head between his knees. “This is a failure.”

“No, it isn’t. We just need to fix the mistake.” And Bruce did. Calmly, meticulously. He corrected the ratio, to substitute for the amount of milk they poured. And then he whisked the gloop until it was smooth and creamy and ready to be portioned into cake tins.

He felt John’s breath down his neck as he dribbled the batter into the tins. “Wow,” he breathed in awe. “You did it!”

“As I said, you just needed to correct the ratio of milk to flour and sugar and so on. And it said to electrically whisk it, not slap it with a wooden spoon.”

John sighed. “I guess I wasn’t so good at baking after all,” he conceded gloomily. “I just hoped I could do one thing for him.”

“Hey, I'm sure he'll love it. Besides, you did most of the work, John. Think of it like... the author makes the draft of their book. Right?”

“Right. How is that relevant?”

“The editor polishes up the draft – they fix the messes, they praise the good things. The author is still credited for the idea and content of their work, and if the editor gets credited for polishing it at all, it’s a tiny acknowledgment.”

“So... I’m the author, and you’re the editor, and the cake is the book?”

“Right.”

“I guess.” John cracked a small smile. “Thanks, buddy.”

“Although, were you making the frosting or eating the frosting?”

John frowned. “Making it, of course... Why?”

Bruce brushed it from the underneath of his lip, sucked it off his finger, and said, “If you’re sure.”

The sound that broke in John’s throat was a spectacular reward.

When the cake was made, and sloppily frosted by John’s hand, Bruce had a startling realisation.

“Crap.”

“What?”

Bruce cringed in embarrassment. “I forgot Alfred is on holiday this week.”

John looked at him uncomprehendingly. “But... how could you forget that?”

“I have a lot on my mind, I guess.” Bruce pinched his eyes wearily. “I’ll take a picture for him instead.”

As Bruce sent Alfred a picture of the finished cake, with ‘John made this for you’ simply scripted underneath it, the sound of John’s phone tolled in the silence. He licked his fingers clean, rolled up his sleeves, and unearthed it from the purple pocket of his jeans.

“It’s Daniel. Our costumes are ready.”

Bruce checked his watch. “Already? That was quick.”

John shrugged. “He’s a quick worker.” He presented him with a picture of the finished product, and Bruce had to admit they were very charming. Almost worth the effort.

John’s suit was purple and green, very fairytale-like, very _John-like_ , all trim and eccentrics. And although Bruce’s was black, even the shirt, the suits were somehow very similar. The shape of them, maybe. They definitely matched, Bruce realised a little gloomily.

He hated matching.

“And now we’re finally ready for the ball!” John announced brightly, before he tried to imitate a serious expression. He failed. “Are you ready, buddy?” There was a manic excitement in his eyes that danced against his irises like a reflection. “Tomorrow night, Jack is finally going down.” 


	5. May I Have This Dance?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry I haven't updated this in so long! I'm not sure if anyone is still interested in this fanfiction, but I am definitely not discontinuing it. I still have more to add to this story! My grandad passed away recently, so I haven't been able to write a lot. Originally, this chapter was going to be longer, but when I got to the end I decided it was natural to end this chapter here, and also I wanted to post sooner. Hopefully the next chapter won't take as long to come out *fingers crossed*. And thank you for all the lovely comments I've received so far. Please comment! You don't even know how much it motivates me. It's the best feeling in the world. <3 That being said, I hope you enjoy!

Bruce looked criminally good in his suit, to the point his own inexperienced, pining heart ached for him.

 

The sight of Bruce in a suit wasn’t something new or unfamiliar – John had seen him in suits, if not smart button-up shirts with pressed brown jeans, more times than he could care to count. But something about the way he looked now, in the tailored, princely outfit that intimately matched John’s own, still made John feel like his knees might cave underneath his weight, even an hour after Bruce had first come out his bedroom donning it.

 

Presently, John cast him a surreptitious look from the corner of his eye – as someone knocked his elbow, jostling him forwards, almost onto his knees, shearing through his illusion of privacy to the reality of the people around him. 

 

He sighed and looked away from the elegant woman in a slinky red dress, which was cut into diamonds on her waist, the one that had knocked him into Bruce with a jab from her impatient elbow. His best friend was surveying the crowd with sharp, intelligent eyes, his arm absentmindedly steadying him with no more than a second’s thought. He felt his heart dive to his feet once again; his hair was slicked back from his forehead, and the dark suit flattered the white porcelain of his skin, but also flattered the grey irises of his eyes...

 

It was making him distant and gloomy.

 

Bruce looked at him, and treated him with a wan, yet seemingly genuine smile. John’s frozen heart thawed to a red, hot puddle, leaking from between his ribs to his feet in gooey tendrils that made him ache inside. He felt irrationally angry in an instant: he heard a thought, bizarre in its nature, cross his mind – _He knows what he’s doing to me_ , he thought sourly. _He does, he has to, he’s teasing me_.

 

And then he felt angry at himself, which only thickened his embittered spirits, that he could think so badly of the only man in his life that mattered to him as much as he did. ( _The only one that matters at all.)_

 

“Are you okay?” Bruce asked for the third time. They were situated at the very edges of the party, which had been dolled up in such regal elegance it stole John’s breath almost as much as Bruce himself: the hall had been transformed from a mundane open space into a brilliant palace ballroom, where couples fanned around them in ball gowns or layered suits worthy of royalty, clinging to the fleshiest, most comforting parts of each other’s arms. Underneath a dripping crystal chandelier, men and women wielding sleek violins and other impressive instruments flooded the hall with a song that suddenly inspired John, who had two left feet when he _wasn’t_ dancing, to take Bruce’s hand and twist him into the waltz.

 

But he couldn’t, even if he had the nerve to, and not because Bruce was supposed to be a straight playboy to the deceived public eye, either – because, for the past twenty minutes, Bruce had been searching for Jack in the crowd, with a demeanour that, although on the very outer layer was tolerant and easy, was clearly, to John Doe’s Bruce-talented eye, business (the Bat, seeing through the eyes of Bruce Wayne).

 

“Yes,” he lied again, although, in reality, he was sick. Not just physically (and physically, he _was_ : he felt hot all over, and he felt light on his feet), but mentally, too: creeping through his heart were sharp, open pains that seemed to be freeing steady freshets of blood, leaving him drained and agonised and sick. It was longing. The most intense longing he’d yet to experience, which felt somehow... wrong. Dirty, sinful, adulterating his blood like poison until he could barely look at him. Longing for Bruce had never felt like this before; _he’d_ never felt like this before, so sure he was going to throw up and pass out and that the world was going to warp into colours and shimmers the next time he blinked.  

 

He knocked back the little amount of drink he had left. It was sweet and bitter, and burned as it slinked down his throat. Seeing colourful stars burst artistically behind his eyelids, he cleared his throat, feeling the first tinges of alarm, and steadied himself on Bruce’s arm, an irrational giggle climbing up his throat. The people that were still entering through the door they were stood near turned to look at the stumble, then looked quickly away in fear of being impolite, although their body language portrayed their curiosity – they all stayed angled towards them, as though getting ready to throw another quick glance over their shoulders at the man on Bruce Wayne’s arm.

 

Bruce felt rigid against him with concern. “John? What’s going on?”

 

“I’m okay, buddy.” John laughed. It sounded weak to his ears. “Just a little tired, that’s all.” He used his sleeve to mop cold sweat from his forehead, feeling and tasting bile on his dry, fluffy tongue, and startled; he wasn’t sure why he’d said that, it would have been better to tell him the truth, that something was dreadfully wrong-

 

“Are you drunk?” Bruce asked, and John, despite himself, flinched back from the palpable hints of disgust in his voice.

 

“What?” John said stupidly. “No, of course not. I’ve only had one glass.” He held up the glass to emphasise, knowing he wasn’t drunk – this was different, this was worse, this was longing but darkness, this was feeling lovesick, but in a way that felt synthetic and wrong. Apprehension opened in his chest, and he opened his mouth to tell Bruce everything: that he felt wrong, so wrong, that his knees might buckle next, but his lips felt like they’d been sewed shut. Worried soon he wouldn’t be able to support his own head, he handed him the glass and disappeared to the bathroom to pamper up.

 

He felt Bruce’s worried, searching eyes on his back as he disappeared.

***

Bruce watched John’s receding figure disappear into the men’s bathroom, feeling a flower of dismay flourish in his chest. Drifting to the drink’s table to discard John’s empty glass courteously felt like walking in a dream: he was physically moving, but his mind was with John in that bathroom, John whose bleached skin had blanched to the colour of soot slowly, John whose mouth had shaped assurance but whose eyes had frozen over with terror. He considered taking a drink, then decided against it, rubbing his sore eyes. He needed to be sharp, he needed to-

 

It was through sheer luck he looked up in time to see Jack moving deliberately through the crowd, his arms outstretched in an aura of confidence and cheer that rang faux to a man on the opposite side of the hall.

 

He watched his movements with deliberation and intensity. Jack was a tall, greying man, and was also a picturesque example of grief. Although his mouth was stretched into a smile, it was an ugly smile – too red on his white, pouchy face, just like the veined whites of his eyes. He was dressed in a brown suit with puffy lace, which flattered the peppering of brown in his hair he’d actually managed to hold on to. Watching him felt like watching a ghost trying to assume a place in the world they’d left behind, too odd and inhuman.

 

He slinked into the crowd, trying to clamp down on the animalistic excitement stirring under his skin at a new hunt, the kind of rash exhilaration that had spurred him through the past two years to continue as Batman in his mission against the darkness tarnishing his city. He tried to get close enough to hear Jack and his companion talking, and, for a moment, almost failed, too; a woman in a red dress, with a diamond cut into her waist, knocked his arm, and as he looked at her, he stumbled, nearly jerking into the shield of people separating him from Jack’s eyes. She didn’t turn around, instead hurrying into the crowd like she hadn’t noticed him at all. Privately exasperated, he smoothed down his suit, before drifting to the drink table again, where, finally, he could hear their voices just slightly, swelling and abating under the music.

 

“-offer my apologies, my friend,” said his companion, and Bruce heard a brief slapping sound - presumably from him hitting his shoulder friendlily a couple of times. “I know what your wife meant to you.”

 

“We were finally getting back on track,” Jack confided, in what was at first a steady, clear voice, before it shuddered apart and broke on his tongue. He sniffled, and Bruce looked over his shoulder from his nimble hands, which was pouring a drink, to cast his eyes to them where they huddled in the open space near the corner of the stage; the orchestra was there still, strumming their instruments lullingly. Jack was crying now, his sleeves dabbing his eyes miserably. “I took her to Hills Cafe just the other week – we re-enacted our first date, and called it our do-over. We drank coffee, and we ate doughnuts, her favourite, and afterwards she invited me back into her bed. When we woke up, she told me she loved me still, and that we should try again. And now...” He sucked in a shuddering breath. “She’s gone.”

 

“Who could do such a thing?” the man asked, his voice soft and compassionate. He had his hand on his arm comfortingly. “What have the police said?”

 

“They’re still investigating. The coroner got back, and she had bites across her breasts. Love bites. They weren’t mine.” Jack looked at his companion with frightened eyes. “Do you think she was having an affair?”

 

“Why does that matter now?” his companion asked, not exactly unkindly. “She’s dead, friend. You have only memories to keep, and you can’t try and tarnish those memories with presumptions.”

 

“But... what if...”

 

“What?”

 

“What if it was her lover who killed her? It happens all the time – the spouses are always the suspects, because murders are usually committed by people closest to the victim, and the person everyone is always closest to is their significant other. Who knows you better than the person you share a bed with, right? The police have been spying on my apartment since her death, but what if _he_ killed her? What if-”

 

“Jack,” his companion said firmly. “What are you doing to yourself?” He tucked a strand of hair from his face with the fondness of a brother. “You’re grieving. I’m grieving too. Your wife was a lovely woman, and we all adored her more than anything. Looking into things such as affairs and conspiracies will only rob the justice of her memory. Jack, look at me.” He tipped up his chin. “Let it go. Do not disappear with the dead. Grief can suck you in and drown you if you let its thoughts defile your head.”

 

Jack nodded slowly. “I... I just wish I appreciated her while I still could. We often forget our own mortality... but we always forget the mortality of the people we love. We could lose them to so many things in the blink of an eye...”

 

Bruce turned away, startled to find an aching pain in his chest. Two dark, tarnished memories rose up to meet him – the first memory was the recollection of the funhouse, where he had told John he didn’t trust him: he could still remember the way the hope that had built in his pensive silence had snuffed out in an instant, replaced by disbelief and wounded anger. He still knew something was true – John had been involved in the killing of those agents, he was sure of it, but after reflecting, and discovering his trust again, he was growing more and more certain Harley had taken them out, and told him to cover for her while she ran. Why else would he stumble so much with his story, if he was truly not the murderer? Why all the inconsistencies? He wasn’t sure if he’d change the past, but he regretted how he’d expressed his doubts.

 

The next memory was darker – the moment when John’s heart had stopped beating, his chest an unmoving symbol of loss and loneliness. The first time he had thought about kissing John with such certainty he was actually going to do it had been then – he could still remember the clawing grief that had mauled his throat, the feeling of the world dissolving underneath him and sending him sprawling down a cold void of hollow, worthless darkness. Scenarios where John was no longer a part of his life had scarred his eyelids, visions of poison and heartbreak. He had only known an agony like it when he was eight years old, and he watched his parents lose their chance to see him have children, to drink at a bar for the first time, to have his first car, to have his first significant other, to marry someone, to see their only child grow up. In those thirty seconds, by far one of the worst experiences of his life, he had experienced what it truly felt like to have a will to push on dissipate.

 

He clenched his hands and tore away from the memories now. What mattered was that he was alive – sick, he was certain, maybe throwing up his champagne in the toilet, but alive. He didn’t need to regard those memories as solid heartbreaks anymore – they could float along the past, like a stick along a stream, further and further away, until it was gone completely. He would never hurt John, and experience pain for him like that, again.

 

“Alfred,” he said, hearing his ear piece blink to life – it whirred steadily, static crackling in his ear, until his father figure’s voice came down to his senses.

 

“Master Bruce?”

 

“I need you to pull up security footage for me. See if Jack’s story is really true – he claimed to have gone on a coffee date with his wife before she died.” Bruce told him the date area, and the time, and waited as he heard Alfred pulling up the systematics. He turned to look casually into the crowd, trying not to draw attention to himself by distancing him from other people. The flute of champagne in his hands was cold, and refreshing, and it kept his thought track focused and clean.

 

“I have the footage here in front of me, Master Bruce. It appears he was telling the truth. They entered the cafe at around five in the afternoon and stayed for an hour before disappearing. The victim looked happy to be in his company, Master Bruce.” Alfred hesitated, seeming to deliberate whether or not to involve himself more in the case. “Is he still a suspect, sir?”

 

“I don’t think so,” Bruce admitted. He almost felt defeated, and that in itself was more crushing than taking five steps backwards. “I’m not a stranger to real grief, and I’m not a stranger to the grief of someone hiding their own lies. He seemed genuine to me. He seemed to think she was having an affair. He was telling the man he was with that he thought the man she was sleeping with might have killed her.”

 

“Do we have any idea who this mysterious gentleman might be, Master Bruce?”

 

“Right now? No. It doesn’t make sense. Everything points to Jack. Whoever’s behind this wanted me to come here and watch him. But if it isn’t him... then it’s someone that’s connected to him somehow.” He turned a mildly accusing eye on his compassionate companion. “Alfred, could you find out who the man is in front of me? He seemed strangely set on Jack not investigating his wife’s murder.”

 

“It could be that he’s involved, and not just concerned for his friend,” Alfred agreed thoughtfully, looking at the man through Bruce's contacts. “Very well, Master Bruce. I’ll look into it for you.”

 

Bruce tightened his hand around the champagne flute. “Alfred? Thank you.”

 

There was a faint smile in Alfred’s voice when he replied. “Yes, well...”

 

With that, having nothing to do but wait for the results, Bruce put down the champagne glass and decided to try and find John.

***

Somewhere overheard, a lightbulb was flickering.

 

John was splashing water on his face in the dank, clean bathroom, his stomach turning over like folded paper in a game of origami. He’d been kneeling on the floor in front of the toilet for so long he felt sore, but nothing had come up yet. He’d even stuck his fingers down his throat, just to quicken the process. It seemed that his stomach didn’t think a flute of champagne and a cup of sweetened coffee was enough to discharge itself, so the swimming nausea in his stomach was only being amplified by a tenfold, untreated and malicious.

 

He had seen plenty of people splash their faces with water in the movies, but the truth was, it made him feel worse. Droplets shed onto the groomed collar of his jacket and shirt, and the perspiration that had broken out across his face only felt doubled and colder. He looked up at his broken reflection and felt a whimper cling to the roof of his mouth, unspoken. His breath was coming in short wheezes, his tongue smooth and dry as glass.

 

His eyes looked jaundiced. He wiped them, hoping the poisoned hue would disappear, but his entire face was sallow and exhausted. He drank deeply from the tap, curing at least the fluffy feeling of his tongue in his mouth, and left the water running as he ducked his head over the sink, coloured hair spraying into his bleary vision. It was probably why he didn’t hear a chorus of sophisticated footsteps as they came in.

 

“I have a message for you.”

 

John jerked up his head, startled – and heard himself giggle nervously. Standing next to him, at the long, gilded sink, was the dark-haired woman who had jostled his arm earlier, her posture erect and dignified. She stood out greatly in her sultry attire – up close, he saw the red dress she wore was silk, skin-tight, and unashamed. It bore no resemblance to the princess gowns he had seen slithering across the floor since he’d arrived. Her pale skin was flattered by her dark, clever eyes, assented by the crimson lipstick on her pursed, earnest mouth. His heart started to pound in terror.

 

“For – For me?” was all he could manage. He tried to imagine what Bruce would do in this situation – not bluster and fumble in fear, that was for sure. He tried to ask who she was, who she worked for, what she wanted, but it was lodged in his swollen throat. The entire world was still spinning. His voice came as a fruitless, thin wisp of air, barely more than a rasp. “What is it?”

 

“Arkham,” she said. She had an accent, roughening the edges of her powerful voice. The power resonating from her suggested, should he displease her, she had all the means to put him down.

 

“Arkham?” he repeated. She pulled something from her blouse pocket deftly, placing it in his shaking hands. He saw it was a small folder, creased to fit – there was nothing on the front but his name.

 

“Arkham.” She pointed at the file. He wondered if she could speak English properly. He had the sudden, inexplicable feeling she couldn’t. “Read.”

 

She made to slink away on her elegant heels, her posture all the more straighter – but he heard himself call out to her. She turned, looked at him patiently, and placed a manicured hand on her hip. “Who do you work for?”

 

She seemed to consider that for a long time, her expression still firm, but thoughtful too. Then she said quietly, “Everyone. Everyone... but one person.”

 

That bounced through his overactive mind as she disappeared out the door. He shook away the eerie feeling that gave him, and retreated into the toilet. Sitting down on the polished porcelain lid, calming his breathing, he opened the file.

 

The first thing he noticed was that there were no papers or notes. It was a thick sheath of photographs, secured in the file by a single paperclip, the feeling of the photograph paper unpleasant and smooth under his fingertips. He removed the paperclip, shot the door’s general direction a paranoid glance, and started going through the pictures one by one, creating a messy pile on his lap as he discarded the ones he’d already seen.

 

There were pictures of Arkham Asylum, shot from a million different angles. He started to wonder why they were there at all, but he had spent the only life he knew in there, before Bruce had come along, and he knew the Arkham Asylum in the picture was a little different to the one he once called home. It looked less modern, somehow, but stronger – the paint looked unpeeled, more sophisticated, and guard activity was greater. He knew it had to be a very early version of the asylum, perhaps just after it had been built.

 

The next group of pictures was pictures of a discontent family. One closer look at them determined it was the family they had been looking into – Jack, the young boy, and the victim. They were all wearing uniforms, their eyes dim, resigned, but having the transparent film of fear too. John was familiar with crazy people, had _lived_ with them, and he knew none of them were crazy. The boy looked younger than eight! So why had they been admitted?

 

The pictures he plucked out next explained that clearly, and he found himself sitting there for a while looking at different news articles numbly. Someone had anonymously called the police and told them they had seen Jack, his wife and his nine-year-old child digging grave-sized holes in their back garden several times in the week. The police investigated, and found the mutilated, raped and discarded bodies of young prostitutes, probably women who had been trying to scrape together money for an education, or to pay off student/gambling debts. A neighbour reported that the family had always been disturbed, and the police had unhesitatingly taken them to the new establishment, Arkham Asylum, for treatment.

 

The next group of photographs was more bizarre, less obvious in their message. It seemed to show a room in Arkham, relatively bare, white-walled: there were tables, strewn with different equipment, like scalpels and electroshock machines. A man in a doctor’s coat was bent over his desk, his face concealed. The pictures grew more intimate with certain objects – there was a close up of a journal of notes, although the writing was obscured with dodgy camera work, and there were several pictures of sophisticated-looking chemistry sets. There was a picture of a liquid in a jug spilling across a table, seeming to be ominous in nature for no reason at all.

 

There were articles about Jack and his wife finally being released from Arkham, after cutting-edge technology and rounds of therapy cured their insanity.

 

It didn’t mention anything about their son.

 

“John?” It was Bruce’s patient voice, cutting through John’s concentration. He jumped, papers fluttering from his lap and skidding across the damp tiles. He bent over, his heart pounding, and started to hurriedly brush them into a pile.

 

“B – Buddy? Is that you?”

 

“Yeah, John, it’s me. Are you being sick?”

 

“Trying to be,” John lied, tucking the folder into his pocket. He wasn’t sure why he felt so tempted to hide it, but he did. Thoughts of showing Bruce the folder felt intrusive, unwelcome. He wondered if it was because Arkham was something, in a sense, only he knew. The story was in that way personal. He wondered if he was just having a breakdown. He opened the lid of the toilet, trying not to slam it against the back, and hunched over the bowl. There. Now he was telling the truth. He may feel strangely territorial over the new information he had acquired, but he still hated lying to Bruce. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

 

There was a long pause, and John exhaled, thinking Bruce had finally left him alone with his hysterical mind. But then, he heard Bruce’s soft voice cut through the daze: “Let me in.”

 

John shot a surprised look at the door. “Sorry, buddy?”

 

“I said let me in.”

 

John’s breathing quickened. _He doesn’t trust me, he doesn’t trust me, he doesn’t trust me-_

 

“John,” Bruce said, sounding a little frustrated. “Stop overthinking and let me comfort you.”

 

John’s heart seemed to stop at that; how did Bruce always know him better than he knew himself? he wondered. For a while, he stared at the door, unsure if he would open it and find the shapeshifter on the other side, leering at his gullibility. Then he opened the door, and Bruce was there, and he was familiar and comforting. He was content to trace his eyes over his face, appreciating him for what he was – beautiful, and right there.

 

Bruce hesitated in the doorway, but only for a moment. He came inside, locked the door, and crammed into the tiny amount of space they had left. He knelt behind him, his breath teasing his hot ear, and wrapped an arm around him, pressing his hard, scarred chest over his bent back. John stopped breathing – and wondered if Bruce noticed; his hand was moving in slow, steady circles along his still-uneasy stomach.

 

“My mother would do this to me,” Bruce told him, sounding lost in thought. His familiar deep voice sighing down his ear made John shiver all over, his nerve endings burning. “My father would stay away from me while I was sick, because he didn’t want to catch it and miss work, but my mother would lay in bed with me and read me stories. There would be a bucket next to my bed, because the bathroom was always so far away, and every time I needed to throw up she would lean over me and rub my stomach and move my hair from my eyes.”

 

John was a mixture between gratified, flattered and surprised to hear this. He smiled. “She sounded like a caring woman, Bruce.”

 

“She was. In a way, that made her harder to lose than my father.” Curiously, as Bruce paused, or hesitated, his heart started to pound harder against his spine. “Which makes me think even more of what Jack said.”

 

“You saw him? What did he say?”

 

“He said we often forget our own mortality, but we always forget the mortality of the people we love. It’s why we take people for granted. Why ring someone when you’re busy if you can ring them later? Well, what if there isn’t a later?”

 

“Buddy, you’re acting strange,” John said. “Did you have some of that champagne?”

 

“No. Hearing what Jack said... it made me think of some things... like us. What happened between us.” Bruce hesitated again. John had never known him to be so hesitant, so unsure. Bruce had always been the most sure thing in his life. “About the funhouse, and how I thought you were dead.” He bent his head to his throat, and John physically jumped as he felt his warm, damp mouth feathering over his skin. He had that thought again – _is it the shapeshifter?_ – but there were things even the shapeshifter couldn’t recreate, like the ripe smell of musk, and the familiar rhythm of Bruce’s heartbeat against his spine. “I can’t ever go through that again.”

 

John’s heart knocked against his best friend’s arm like the wings of a startled bird. “Gosh – you won’t, buddy! I have _you_ in my corner now. And I know nothing can hurt me while you’re here – and my favourite bat friend is in my corner too. I’m safe.”

 

“It isn’t other people I’m worried about. It’s me. I'm worried _I'll_ hurt you - again.”

 

John turned in his arms, surprised (pleasantly) when Bruce didn’t let go. His troubled face peered down at him beneath the dim light, washed with shadows, marred with premature lines of stress. “You have the power to hurt me more than anyone else, buddy,” he said, his heart rising to his throat. His fingers brushed down his jaw, nothing else in the world there with them. His skin was so soft, just like he’d imagined it would be, supple to the touch. “But some things are worth the risk. They always were.”

 

It seemed like a barrier broke between them. Bruce used the arm he had around him to swoop him into their first kiss, his hands sliding under his shirt and his jacket to soothingly massage over his back. John fell into a world of adoration and heat, not quite sure where he was or what he was, but knowing this felt right.

 

The kiss was warm, slightly damp, and endearingly clumsy. He wasn’t sure what to do – he had seen people move their lips in movies, but it looked hard to do, and the kiss was so hesitant and gentle he was terrified to change it. _Should I do the tongue thing?_

 

Then he heard Bruce murmur against his mouth not to overthink it; his breath tickled his lips, his mouth vibrated against his, and John took his advice and experienced the kiss for what it was, a flawed but incredibly beautiful sensation of their mouths pressing together. He could sense the feelings Bruce had struggled to put into words for so long in his kisses, which were so tender, so cautious, and he felt tears glossing the thin area between his eyelids and his eyes.

 

Bruce’s warm, large hand cupped his cheek, seeming to consume it. There were scars networked across his palm, feeling wiry against John’s skin, another perfect imperfection John adored. His pulse hammered against his jaw. When Bruce finally pulled away, John giggled and didn’t open his eyes, even when Bruce set his forehead against his.

 

“That wasn’t what you deserved.” Bruce’s sigh was already lost and regretful.

 

“What?” John clung with white(r) knuckles to his lapels, scared he would extract himself from the moment otherwise, terrified he was terrified by his own feelings towards a criminal in many ways beneath him.

 

Bruce looked around, and John realised what he meant, relief pumping through him: they were in a bathroom. They had had their first kiss in a bathroom.

 

“It was perfect.” John reached up, unsurely placing his forehead against the corner of Bruce’s jaw. “Thank you, buddy. I wasn’t sure I would have ever had the confidence to-” He didn’t finish his thought.

 

“Yeah, me too.” Bruce stood up, and held out his hand. He was carefully expressionless, hiding what he truly felt behind a familiar mask. John wasn’t sure how he himself felt, but he knew he felt capable of floating. Golden blood was starting to crack through the shock. “We should get back.”

 

John let himself be pulled up. “O-Of course, buddy.” He dusted himself off, feeling the hard edges of the folder in his pocket. “Oh, and this is for you.” He held out the folder reluctantly. He felt the burn of loss as Bruce plucked it from his fingers.

 

“What is it?” Bruce asked.

 

John explained everything that had happened, watching his best friend’s expressions move and change. When he was done, Bruce was already leafing through the folder.

 

“Come on,” he eventually said, tucking the folder into his pocket. “We should get back to the party. There’s someone we need to keep an eye on.”

 

“Jack?”

 

“No. Someone else.”

 

John followed him into the ballroom dance. His senses were instantly violated, and he clamped down on the panic and the giggles to plaster on a smile for the people that were staring. He took another champagne flute from a passing waiter.

 

Bruce cut his sharp, intelligent eyes to the glass. “Put that back.”

 

John jumped at his alarm. “Why, buddy?”

 

“You felt sick earlier, didn’t you? Just call it a hunch.” Bruce’s nimble fingers plucked the champagne away and placed it on the drink’s table. “Something about this party isn’t right.”

 

John stood awkwardly at the edge of the crowd, aware a thousand eyes were on them. He realised how awkward they must look, and turned towards Bruce, his skin rippling in discomfort. “Hey, buddy?”

 

“Yes, John?”

 

“Have you ever danced with a man before?”

 

Bruce looked at him sharply, seeming surprised. Then he smiled a little, liquidating the joints in John’s knees. “No.”

 

John held out his hand, his heart beating too fast, too hard in his chest. He looked at him under his eyelashes, afraid to meet his eyes head-on. “Do you want to?”

 

Bruce’s eyes flicked surreptitiously over the crowd, before he slid his hand into his, smiled courteously, and let himself be whisked onto the dance floor. People stared at them speculatively as they bowed to each other, and John found himself giggling anxiously, but Bruce pressed a hand against the small of his back and led him into a dance that was so fluid John felt like his limbs had been replaced with water.

 

The slow dance was awkward but endearing; John couldn’t compete with Bruce’s skills in intimate dancing, because to do so would be to compete against an intricate playboy mask, so he often stumbled and stood on his feet, and Bruce had always had difficulty maintaining eye contact when all his walls were stripped away, leaving the raw ‘Bruce Wayne’ behind. He had a softening habit of looking sideways at the floor for a long time, and then smiling at him a little. Their hearts beat against each other, their bodies close enough to share heat.

 

“I’ve never slow-danced before,” John admitted quietly. Blood seemed to be throbbing in his cheeks. “So... I’m glad my first time is with you, buddy.”

 

“Me too, John.” Bruce twirled him, and John caught his foot awkwardly when he was halfway around. He stumbled, his heart rebounding to his throat in surprise as he realised the floor was rushing to meet him. Bruce caught him, a strong, muscle-corded arm suspending him halfway from the ground in an intimate dip that corresponded sweetly with the melody. “I’ve got you.”

 

John giggled breathlessly. “I guess you could say I... _fell for you_.” He straightened and dusted himself off, clearing his throat in embarrassment as the jest drifted between them, undignified and anxious. He looked up and found Bruce smiling at him. His breath caught. “Bruce-”

 

The ear piece in his ear crackled to life; Bruce’s seemed to reawaken, too, because his eyes sharpened, losing their intimate tenderness. Bruce swept him into his arms and guided him to the edge of the ballroom, away from most of the other dancers, their dancing now slow and distracted as Bruce said his (for all intensive purposes) father’s name.

 

“I looked into the man who was talking to Jack, and I managed to scrape quite a few skeletons out of his closet, Master Bruce.”

 

“Good work, Al. Tell me what you know." 

 

John wrapped his arms around Bruce’s shoulders, his legs shaking with nausea, as he listened thoughtfully to Alfred’s voice, feeling Bruce’s distracted arms curling around his waist. His mind flashed to the file again, to Jack’s inmate pictures. His throat thickened a little as he looked over Bruce’s shoulder, spotting the man laughing with Jack across the room.

 

“His name is Dr. Jake Gateford. He’s worked at Arkham Asylum since... well, since it was built, sir. He grew up in the Narrows to an alcoholic family, graduated outside of Gotham in one of the most pretentious medical schools in the states, but came back when he finally had his medical licence in the seventies. He has a criminal record so long I frankly couldn’t finish reading through it. It seems he became a doctor at Arkham Asylum because he couldn’t find employment elsewhere.”

 

“When was his last sentence?” John asked.

 

“Two years ago, Master John,” Alfred said. Despite the seriousness of the situation, a brief warmth flared in his chest at the neutral respect of that title. “It seemed he was involved in human trafficking, as well as being reported on numerous occasions for sexually harassing both genders in the work place.”

 

“Disgusting pig,” remarked John, his face creasing angrily.

 

“There’s a chance he’s still involved in criminal activity,” mused Bruce. “Al-”

 

“I already took the liberty of hacking into his emails and reviewing the CCTV footage of places I know he attends sometimes, Master Bruce,” Alfred dismissed. John saw Bruce blink in honest, pleasant surprise. “It seems he’s been running a gang in the Narrows. Mysterious killings involving homeless people and young prostitutes have become more common as of late. He has confessed on email to a few of these crimes.”

 

“Who are they?”

 

“He refers to the gang in emails as ‘The Society’.”

 

“Who are the emails to?” John asked.

 

“A woman. A woman he calls ‘my darling’.”

 

“A woman?” Bruce asked. “Does he ever refer to her by name?”

 

“Oh, yes. It seems Jack’s wife was somewhat discontent with her married life and decided to extend her bedroom invitation to his best friend.”

 

Bruce and John shared a look. John said, “So... he was sleeping with the victim? Did Jack know about this? Did she know about The Society?”

 

“Know about them? She more than knew about them, Master John. It seems to me she was leading them by his side.”

 

Startled, John opened his mouth to respond, but the dizziness he had been feeling since he had finished the drink overwhelmed him. As he slackened in Bruce’s arms, he saw him look at him in alarm, before the world heaved under his feet, and suddenly and sickeningly and confusingly, he was falling into darkness.

 

 


End file.
